At The Movies: The Roses a rancorous anti-romcom, old is gold in The Thursday Murder Club

The Roses (M18)

95 minutes, opens on Sept 4
★★★☆☆

The story: Ten idyllic years and two children after their meet-cute at a London restaurant kitchen, British spouses Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) move to the United States and start hating each other.

Theo in The Roses is a starchitect, whose museum showpiece on the Northern California coast collapses in a freak storm, along with his career.

The same superstorm reroutes a food critic to Ivy’s seaside crab shack.

In an overnight reversal of fortunes, Ivy becomes a celebrity chef and Theo a humiliating meme.

The frustrated, unemployable husband is left at home to raise, feed and delouse the kids, while his wife jet-sets around her expanding business empire as the family’s breadwinner.

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner were at least spared the professional jealousies and gender power shifts in The War Of The Roses (1989).

This 21st-century update of the marital black comedy based on Warren Adler’s 1981 bestseller is directed by Jay Roach (Austin Powers, 1997 to 2002; Meet The Parents, 2000 to 2004). It is relatable, how the resentments build into ugly divorce.

The supporting ensemble has Andy Samberg as Theo’s lawyer and a hyper-sexualised Kate McKinnon slobbering all over him.

Cumberbatch’s and Colman’s dual star power and wit class up the farce, the two real-life long-time friends deftly slinging vitriol and profane insults that are at once savagely funny and very sad.

The couple’s sarcasm is like their shared secret language. There is still love, commingled with the loathing, and the Americans can never tell if they are merely flirting.

“You’re so dry,” one marvels.

“Only when my husband looks at me,” is Ivy’s reply.

Hot take: This rancorous anti-romcom is a happy marriage of Hollywood studio entertainment and English drollery.

The Thursday Murder Club (NC16)

118 minutes, streaming on Netflix
★★★☆☆

The story: Four geriatric amateur sleuths played by Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie have an actual homicide to solve when a corpse turns up on their doorstep.

The British quartet headlining the Netflix production The Thursday Murder Club have between them four Olivier Awards for London theatre, two Oscars and a stint as James Bond.

They are a thoroughly captivating team, even if they will not be winning any additional awards for this cosy caper adapted from the first novel in English television presenter Richard Osman’s best-selling whodunnit series.

Mirren’s steely Elizabeth Best was a spymaster, Brosnan’s Ron Ritchie a crusading union leader, Kingsley’s Ibrahim Arif a psychiatrist and Imrie’s former nurse Joyce Meadowcroft bakes amazing cakes. They are the eponymous club, meeting weekly in the Jigsaw Room of their palatial retirement village to investigate cold case crimes.

How a pensioner can afford such accommodation is a mystery for another day.

The matter at hand is the fatal bludgeoning of their home’s owner. His no-good property partner (David Tennant), who wants to redevelop the residence into luxury flats, is the obvious suspect, although there are multiple plot twists, yet little sense of genuine danger, from Hollywood director Chris Columbus of family fare Home Alone (1990) and Mrs Doubtfire (1993).

The septuagenarian heroes are not easily rattled anyway. Death is a daily reality among them. They have been around long enough to have seen it all. Elizabeth was notably head of foreign intelligence during the Cold War.

People underestimate them because they are old, and she shrewdly exploits society’s ageism to get sympathy, get incriminating information and get the culprit.

Hot take: Who you calling geezers? The starry cast of pros put the fun and fight into active ageing.