The Roses Review: A Wasted Opportunity Despite Colman and Cumberbatch's Chemistry

The Roses 

Directed by: Jay Roach

Written by: Tony McNamara

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Kate McKinnon

Release Date: August 29, 2025

The Roses (2025), starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, aims for sharp satire but stumbles over lazy writing and implausible storytelling. Here’s why Jay Roach’s latest comedy fails to bloom.

A Comedy Built on a Flimsy Foundation

The Roses asks audiences to accept a setup that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Theo Rose, a world-class architect whose career is destroyed when a storm brings down one of his signature projects: a sailing museum topped with a massive wooden sail that crashes through the structure.

It’s a striking image, sure—but the logic doesn’t hold. Are we really to believe that a wildly successful architect wouldn’t account for basic weather conditions? Add to that the fact that architects design, while engineers and builders execute, and the idea of Theo being solely blamed for this disaster feels like screenwriting corner-cutting.

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Overnight Success, Overnight Failure

If Theo’s implausible fall from grace wasn’t enough, his wife Ivy (Olivia Colman) experiences an equally improbable rise. Her failing seafood restaurant, cheekily named We’ve Got Crabs, becomes an impromptu storm shelter. By sheer coincidence, one of the stranded diners is the world’s most influential food critic. Ivy’s cooking earns her a glowing review, and overnight she’s a culinary star while Theo is a professional pariah.

It’s an amusing contrast, but the lack of plausibility makes it hard to buy. Restaurants on the brink of closure don’t stock enough ingredients to feed a packed house during a storm. These details may seem minor, but they highlight the script’s laziness—problems that could have been fixed with minimal effort.

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Kate McKinnon’s Wasted Talent

One of the strangest missteps is Kate McKinnon’s role. While McKinnon is undeniably talented, her brief, out-of-nowhere appearances feel like filler rather than genuine comedy. In one particularly awkward third-act scene, she pops in, delivers an offbeat line, and vanishes, clearly inserted because director Jay Roach felt the film needed a laugh break.

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Chemistry That Can’t Save the Script

Despite the weak script, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman are the movie’s saving grace. Their sharp banter, biting insults, and electric chemistry add genuine spark, especially in their flirtatious meet-cute. For a brief moment, it feels like The Roses might deliver a dark, screwball energy akin to The War of the Roses (1989). Unfortunately, those flashes of brilliance fade fast, leaving a comedy that feels forced and unfocused.

Why is Andy Samberg in this movie? He's filling the role played by Danny Devito in the 1989 version of this story, The War of the Roses, but where Devito felt essential to that film Samberg is awkwardy shoehorned into The Roses. He's supposed to be Benedict Cumberbatch's closest friend but the two have zero chemistry. I do like Andy Samberg but he is dreadfully miscast as a modern day yuppie lawyer. He's also given nothing to work with by a desperately overstuffed and still lazy screenplay. 

Allison Janney, on the other hand, brings it in a cameo as Ivy's divorce lawyer. Where the rest of The Roses flounders, unwilling to fully commit to the nasty tone of the 1989 movue, Janney plays her part as if she should have been cast in place of Olivia Colman. Janney's energy is pure mercenary comic savagery and I loved it. It's about the only thing I love about this otherwise desperately mediocre and inept film. 

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Final Verdict

The Roses is proof that star power and witty dialogue aren’t enough to save a film with a flimsy premise and lazy writing. While Cumberbatch and Colman give it their all, Jay Roach’s direction leans too heavily on contrivances and random gags, resulting in a movie that feels half-baked. Fans of the stars might find a few laughs, but most audiences will leave disappointed.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere — A Soulful Look at the Making of Nebraska

Springsteen Deliver Me from Nowhere

Directed by: Scott Cooper

Written by: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Odessa Young, Stephen Graham

Release Date: October 24, 2025

4.5 out of 5 stars

Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a raw, poetic music biopic that captures Bruce Springsteen’s soul-searching journey through the making of Nebraska. Jeremy Allen White gives one of the year’s most powerful performances in this haunting portrayal of The Boss at a crossroads.

A Different Kind of Music Biopic

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is not your typical music biopic. Rather than tracing Bruce Springsteen’s entire life or career, Scott Cooper’s film zeroes in on a single, defining moment — the creation of Nebraska, one of the most personal and daring albums ever made by a major recording artist.

Coming off the chart-topping success of The River and standing on the edge of superstardom with Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen was poised to become an American icon. Yet, instead of leaning into commercial glory, he turned inward. The film powerfully captures this creative detour — a spiritual reckoning that would define the artist he became.

A Record Born from Darkness

Cooper’s film shows a restless Springsteen retreating to a secluded home in the woods of New Jersey. Still sweating from his marathon River tour, Bruce craves peace but finds none. His mind is haunted by old ghosts, regrets, and fears that can only be exorcised through music.

As Jeremy Strong’s Jon Landau shields Bruce from the pressures of record executives, he watches helplessly as his friend unravels. The industry demands radio hits — but Bruce is chasing something far more personal: truth, pain, and redemption.

Amid the creative storm, Bruce meets Faye (Odessa Young), a local woman whose quiet warmth offers a fleeting sense of connection. Their romance, tender but doomed, becomes another layer of emotional fuel for the songs that would make Nebraska timeless.

The Inspiration Behind Nebraska

What makes Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere remarkable is Cooper’s refusal to reduce the album’s genesis to tidy cinematic moments. The film doesn’t rely on obvious “aha!” inspirations. Yes, we see Springsteen watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands — the direct inspiration for the song “Nebraska” — but most of the music seems to emerge from deep within Bruce’s psyche.

In one of the film’s most striking interpretations, Bruce’s fascination with the story of Charles Starkweather reflects his fear of his own darker impulses. Cooper subtly suggests that Bruce identifies with the violence and isolation of his subjects — that his empathy comes from confronting his own emotional volatility.

The Father and the Ghosts of Home

Running beneath the entire film is Springsteen’s fraught relationship with his father, powerfully portrayed by Stephen Graham in what feels like an Oscar-worthy supporting performance. In monochrome flashbacks, we see a man broken by life — angry, volatile, but deeply human.

Bruce’s complicated relationship with his father is a dark undercurrent throughout all of Nebraska, culminating in the song My Father’s House, a broken hearted elegy that may not be fully autobiographical but carries within it all the hurt feelings and lasting love that defined Bruce’s love for his father.

Watching White and Graham give life to these two complicated men is devastating in its beauty and power. Lifetimes of emotions clash and when you see their final scene together in Springsteen Deliver Me from Nowhere, I dare you not to cry. A Father and a son unable to say the things they’ve always wanted to say coming out instead as tears.

Jeremy Allen White Delivers a Career-Defining Performance

Jeremy Allen White doesn’t look exactly like Bruce Springsteen — and that’s the point. His performance transcends imitation. What he captures instead is the essence of The Boss: the haunted eyes, the internal struggle, the yearning to express something too painful for words.

White’s performance feels lived-in, exhausted, and electric all at once. You can feel the tension in his shoulders and hear the weight of the songs in his silences. When he strums through “Atlantic City” or “Highway Patrolman,” it’s less an act of recreation and more a spiritual channeling.

A Film Worthy of the Album

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere achieves what few music biopics do — it matches the soul of its subject. Scott Cooper’s subdued, naturalistic direction mirrors the stark black-and-white poetry of Nebraska. The film is quiet, mournful, and deeply moving, avoiding Hollywood gloss in favor of honesty.

Like the album itself, this film is not about fame, but about isolation and redemption. It’s about a man confronting himself before he can face the world.

By the end, Deliver Me from Nowhere feels less like a biopic and more like an elegy — not just for a record, but for a version of Bruce Springsteen that had to die so the rest of his legend could live.

One of the best films of 2025 — and one of the most human.

Tron: Ares (2025) Review — Jared Leto Leads a Cold Return to the Grid

Tron Ares (2025)

Directed by: Joaquim Rønning

Written by: Jesse Wigutow

Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jeff Bridges, Evan Peters, Gillian Anderson

Release Date: October 10, 2025

Tron: Ares (2025) brings Jared Leto into Disney’s neon-drenched cyber world — but despite stellar visuals and a score from Nine Inch Nails, this third Tron film remains as sleek and soulless as ever.

The Emptiness at the Core of the Tron Universe

In my original review of Tron (1982), I recalled a joke that the formerly funny Dennis Miller made about how Tron was Al Gore’s favorite movie — a jab at Gore’s perceived stiffness and lack of emotion. That comparison remains apt. For all of Tron’s digital brilliance, it has always felt like a movie with a frozen core: dazzling to look at, but empty inside.

The 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy did little to change that perception. It was stylish, yes, and Daft Punk’s score became an instant classic. But its characters — and its story — were as cold and mechanical as the circuitry on screen. Watching Tron: Legacy again this week, I was struck by how little I remembered of it.

Ares and the Battle for Permanence

Now, fifteen years later, Tron: Ares continues the same sleek, emotionless trajectory. Jared Leto stars as Ares, a computer program created by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the soulless CEO of the Dillinger Corporation. His mission: bring the Grid — the digital world of Tron — into the real world.

Ares is designed as a kind of disposable soldier, a program who can die and be reprinted endlessly to keep fighting. But there’s a catch — Ares can only exist in the real world for 29 minutes before he “derezzes” and must be reprinted again. Dillinger’s plan hinges on acquiring something called the permanence code, a lost piece of programming once created by Encom founder Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) that could allow digital beings to live permanently in the physical world.

Unfortunately for Dillinger, the code is held — or possibly hidden — by Encom’s new CEO, Eve Kim (Greta Lee). When Ares is sent to retrieve the code, he discovers something unexpected: through hacking her life, he begins to understand her kindness, loss, and humanity. When ordered to kill her, Ares rebels against his creator and sides with Eve to uncover the permanence code and perhaps, finally, become real.

Between Two Worlds — and Neither Feels Alive

Unlike Tron and Tron: Legacy, which spent most of their time inside the Grid, Tron: Ares splits its story between the digital and physical worlds. In doing so, director Joaquim Rønning loses much of what makes Tron unique. Fans come to this series for the surreal, luminous world inside the computer — not for generic real-world chase scenes.

The action in the real world feels like it could belong to any other sci-fi blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Grid scenes, which should feel wondrous, are bogged down by dull philosophical chatter about the nature of life and emotion. “Is intelligence life? Is feeling a certain way about Depeche Mode a sign of humanity?” asks one character. The question might sound clever, but like much of Tron: Ares, it’s more mechanical than meaningful.

Jeff Bridges’ Ghost in the Machine

Jeff Bridges, returning as Kevin Flynn, remains the franchise’s only emotional anchor. In interviews before the film’s release, Bridges admitted he was surprised to be asked back. That self-aware amusement carries into his performance, as Flynn appears like a ghostly echo of his younger self — an aging program clinging to his identity.

It’s a touching presence in an otherwise sterile film. Bridges feels alive, even as his digital double does not.

A Cold, Beautiful Void

There’s no denying Tron: Ares looks incredible. The visuals are slick, the design meticulous, and the Nine Inch Nails score pulses with industrial energy. But the film itself feels empty — as if constructed by the same algorithms that populate its world.

Greta Lee’s Eve Kim carries real emotional weight, but she’s underused. Jared Leto’s Ares is all surface, no soul. Gillian Anderson, as Julian Dillinger’s mother and the former CEO of Dillinger Corp, provides the film’s only truly human spark. When she slaps her son in anger, it’s a jolt of genuine life — the kind of shock this movie desperately needs more of.

Final Thoughts: The Grid Without a Pulse

Tron: Ares is visually astonishing but emotionally vacant — a movie that confuses aesthetic precision for meaning. Like its predecessors, it’s a film about artificial life that feels oddly lifeless.

For a franchise built on the collision between humanity and technology, Tron: Ares remains trapped inside the machine.