'On the Rocks': Film Review | NYFF 2020

Playing a 65-year-old New York high-society widow who burns through her savings and moves to Paris with her son in Azazel Jacobs'French Exit, Michelle Pfeiffer sucks the juice from each line like a Louisianan devouring a crawfish. It's a full-on diva turn — a smorgasbord of side-eye and shade, of lacerating one-liners dispatched between drags on cigarettes and slurps of martinis.

Even without yet having seen all five of the original films in Steve McQueen's riveting Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, which surveys two decades of West Indian experience in London, it seems appropriate that the series concludes with a story of Black resistance embodied in the determination of one idealistic man.

Few filmmakers can bring a rut to life like Sofia Coppola. When her characters are in a funk, whether it’s a Hollywood actor in between jobs, a few lost souls in a foreign place or a Queen, it’s never the stuff of melodrama.

Steve McQueen's ravishing Lovers Rock summons a potent sense of a community gathering that caresses and cocoons those present, shutting out the hostilities of the city outside. The second movie to premiere at the New York Film Festival from the director's Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, Mangrove, which is set a decade earlier, in 1968-70, shows how another regular gathering place for the same immigrant community provides a cherished home away from home.

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

Anthony D'Alessandro Editorial Director/Box Office EditorIt really hasn’t been broadcasted widely, but Sofia Coppola’s latest dramedy from Apple/A24, On the Rocks, is opening in key markets next weekend, Oct. 2.

Men are incorrigible Lothario scoundrels, motherhood is full of loneliness and self-doubt, and complicated father/daughter relationships are constantly tested in Sofia Coppola’s “On The Rocks,” her latest dramedy, an effervescent, charming, and soulful affair.

2.5 stars (out of 4)There never was a sequel to Lost in Translation. Everyone who saw writer-director Sofia Coppola’s moody and exquisite 2003 arthouse hit must give their own interpretation as to what Bill Murray whispered into the ear of Scarlett Johansson as the two parted ways in Tokyo.

Despite studios moving films such as Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake out of the calendar year and questions about whether some films will actually hit theaters, there are still new Oscar contenders being revealed for critics and AMPAS members alike. Over the past 48 hours, Netflix virtually screened Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” for select media, and A24 and Apple debuted Sofia Coppola’s “On the Rocks” at the 2020 New York Film Festival.

In the pantheon of perfect Bill Murray roles — “Caddyshack,” “Groundhog Day,” “Lost In Translation” — his smooth-talking character in the new comedy “On The Rocks” ranks as one of the best.He plays Felix, a suave New York renaissance man and art dealer in Sofia Coppola’s wonderful movie — the pair’s first narrative feature collaboration since 2003’s “Lost In Translation” — which premiered Wednesday night in the New York Film Festival.Murray, bless him, brought me back to the New York we all miss

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIf you go back and watch Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (2003), you’ll see that it’s lost none of its shimmer — that airily crafted blend of mood and moment, location and dislocation, all wrapped around the delicate tale of two souls who didn’t know they were lost until they found each other in the floating limbo of the Park Hyatt Tokyo.

When his girlfriend can’t get pregnant, a trans man decides to carry the child in her stead in the French drama A Good Man. This is the latest feature from writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

A coming-of-age drama set against true events that roiled Quebec in 1990, Beans is a story of awakening and identity for its title character. She's a smart and high-spirited resident of the Mohawk reserve Kahnawà:ke, and her single-syllable nickname comes in especially handy in the opening scene: The principal of the private high school she wants to attend stumbles repeatedly, and unapologetically, over the girl's given name, Tekahentahkhwa.

Two sisters from a Northern Irish town close to the border with Eire, played by Nika McGuigan and Nora-Jane Noone, feel the long shadow of both the Troubles and their own troubled past when they're reunited after a long estrangement in British-Irish co-production Wildfire.

There's a heady, hypnotic interlude midway through Steve McQueen's dreamy celebration of Black community and culture, Lovers Rock, when Janet Kay's 1979 hit "Silly Games" plays out on the turntable and is taken up by the people crammed into the suburban London living room where a house party is being held. For a full five minutes they continue singing a cappella — the women in particular — their voices matched by the ecstasy of their swaying bodies.

Also Read: Sofia Coppola, Pedro Almodovar and Orson Welles Doc Added to New York Film Festival LineupWhile there’s always a sense that Walsh is enough of an innate politician to always be aware of Wiseman’s camera without ever acknowledging it – even in more intimate settings, he always talks like someone making sure he can’t be misquoted – he brings a real personal touch to the job, whether he’s relating to those veterans and their need for counseling and outreach by sharing stories of his own

Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).

Facing his mother's worsening leukemia, a boy turns his curious mind from detective stories to supernatural lore in David Oyelowo's The Water Man, a family adventure set against a lush Pacific Northwest backdrop. Doing double-duty behind and in front of the camera (playing the boy's father) Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.