Film reviews: On the Rocks | The Witches | The Secret Garden | Honest Thief | The Summer of 85 | The Climb

The latest film from Sofia Coppola, On the Rocks, sees the writer/director re-team with Bill Murray for the first time on film since Lost in Translation and, not entirely coincidentally, it’s her most entertaining effort since that 2003 masterpiece.

Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in On The Rocks

A loose, likeable father-daughter caper movie that allows Murray a lot of latitude to be as louche and sardonic as he wants, it eases up on the formalistic rigour that’s had a tendency to make a lot of Coppola’s films aesthetically rich but dramatic inert and instead has a good time with her characters as they move through their gilded New York world of hipster lofts, exclusive dining clubs and private art collections. Rashida Jones stars as Laura, a novelist whose transition to being a mother of two young girls is suddenly causing her to feel insecure about her marriage to husband Dean (Marlon Wayans) as he becomes consumed with launching a new tech start-up. Enter Felix (Murray), Laura’s raffish father, a wealthy art dealer and incorrigible flirt who swoops in from Paris not so much to reassure her about her otherwise stable and loving family life, but to playfully encourage her suspicions with amusingly retrogressive theories about male evolution and an absurd plan to start tailing Dean around the city. The latter results in Felix and Laura becoming the world’s most conspicuous gumshoes as they gad about a very romanticised version of New York in Felix’s ludicrous sports car. Of course in Felix’s eyes it’s all kind of a lark, a rueful way to reassert his position as the most important man in his daughter’s life, even though both she and him know his infidelities messed up her childhood. Coppola touches on this theme delicately without breaking the good-time vibes and Murray gives us just a glimpse of the regret and loneliness that Felix’s exuberant lifestyle might be masking. In the end, the film functions as a kind of affectionate swan-song for an old-school type of guy who knows his time is up but is determined to go out in the decadent style to which he’s become accustomed.

Roald Dahl’s delightfully macabre 1983 children’s novel The Witches gets an entertaining update courtesy of director Robert Zemeckis and his co-writers Guillermo Del Toro and Kenya Barris. Transposing the story of an orphaned boy and his grandmother’s run-in with a coven of child-hating witches from Britain to America, specifically Alabama circa 1968, the specificity of the location switch adds an intriguing racial dimension to the story, but otherwise this is a pretty faithful adaptation, retaining the age-appropriate malevolence of Dahl’s book, as well as his wonderfully unsentimental ending (something Nicholas Roeg’s much-loved 1990 film version failed to do). Octavia Spencer is on amusing form as the aforementioned grandmother, whose knowledge of witches enthrals her grandson but can’t quite keep him out of harm’s way; Anne Hathaway, meanwhile, is in primo form, vamping it up as the CG-augmented head witch with a devilish plan to rid the world of children. Chris Rock co-stars as the film’s mousey narrator.

The Witches is a lot more fun than the new version of The Secret Garden. Setting Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved story — which begins in India before transferring to the Yorkshire Moors — against the backdrop of Partition initially suggests the film might have some interesting new take on this classic tale. Instead, it’s merely a plot kicker to get its attention-seeking orphan protagonist (Dixie Egerickx) to her decrepit uncle’s ghostly English country estate where she stumbles upon the titular garden and discovers that its restorative properties might help her and her crippled cousin overcome their troubled family histories. It’s all a bit dreary and earnest and has been production-designed to within an inch of its life to disguise the fact that nothing much really happens. Colin Firth and Julie Walters provide solid, if unimaginative, support.

Anne Hathaway in The Witches

"Solid if unimaginative" is a good way to describe Liam Neeson’s latest action thriller. In Honest Thief he plays a safe-cracker with a conscience whose determination to turn himself in after a series of lucrative bank heists goes awry when a corrupt cop (Jai Courtney — reliably awful) attempts to steal his stash before he can return the money. It’s completely implausible, but there’s still mileage in Neeson’s reluctant tough guy persona. With limited options in cinemas, this works as disposable brain-off Friday night entertainment.

A toxic male friendship is examined through a wry comic lens in The Climb, a series of vignettes focussing on different life-changing moments in the adult lives of two friends (Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin) who can’t seem to live without each other, despite the repeatedly harmful effect one has on the personal life of the other. Tightly performed and scripted by its two stars (Covino also directed it), it’s tonally similar to last year’s Thunder Road and has a similarly sweet pay-off.

A minor film from mercurial French director François Ozone, Summer of 85 isn’t quite as evocative as its nostalgia-courting title suggests. A gay teen coming-of-age story that focuses on the complications of first love rather than the complications of coming out, it teases a somewhat macabre story (involving a dead body) that’s less interesting than it sounds. Lively performances from its young French cast see it through, but it’s no Call Me By Your Name.

On the Rocks is available to stream on Apple TV+; The Witches is available on digital download from 26 October; The Secret Garden is available in cinemas and to stream on Sky Cinema; Honest Thief and The Climb are in cinemas; Summer of 85 is available in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.