Kritiken

For a while, the film teeters on the brink of sitcom territory (men and women cannot be friends! they have to be hitting on each other!), but rescues itself by introducing a degree of complexity.

Coppola’s script raises the spectre of feminist politics only to dodge any real engagement with it, expecting her audience to read Laura as a modern feminist seemingly without any evidence to back it up.

[I]t’s probably Sofia’s least annoying feature-length foray. That her self-centered approach lacks the hysteria and hostility of the current political moment makes it tolerable.

Coppola’s script is built around Murray’s deadpan savoir faire, with Jones’ forthright radiance as a foil. But with this, as with all of Coppola’s pictures, it’s the layering of details that counts, the accretion of sly but not minor observations that come to form the whole, like the stippled strokes of a Seurat painting.

This film is the slightest story Coppola has ever produced; it only brushes up against deeper insights during its brief running time. But the movie offers such a rush of unintentional catharsis and pure diversion that its flaws are easy to forgive.

Coppola eschews the tedium of moral scrutiny to find wisdom in flaws – an old-soul intuition that has sometimes been dismissed as overly ambivalent, or as a failure to properly interrogate its subjects.

...Sofia Coppola’s very enjoyable (and deceptively deep) seventh feature [is] a film that knowingly lifts riffs from screwball capers and melancholy romcoms alike, writing love letters to the city of New York as it swirls from one upmarket fairytale locale to the next.

The way the movie looks and sounds is deliberately old-fashioned... But there’s something so modern about the dynamic between the gorgeously knackered-looking leads.

The story is slight, but in Coppola’s hands the film is infused with small moments that provide gateways to deeper emotions... On the Rocks is light-hearted and, ultimately, more a story about a girl and her father. The good and the bad of that parental legacy and the task of disentangling from it forms the subtext of On the Rocks.

On the Rocks contains no great revelations. No one whispers the secrets of the universe into another’s ear. Laura’s transformation is a quiet one, a gentle untethering from the restrictions she’s put on herself as “someone’s daughter” and “someone’s wife”, and into a more rounded sense of self.

In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in “On the Rocks,” a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.

It’s strange. On The Rocks’ setup seems the stuff of rom-com rompery. Murray certainly plays well into that realm. Yet Coppola undercuts the whimsy with a heroine who is resolutely sullen and limp.