THE ROSES

Here's the honest tension. This is a genuinely well-made film — witty, scary, touching, heartwarming, dramatic, and nearly always compelling. It even ends by validating marriage after showing you exactly how a marriage can rot. On craft alone, it earns its three stars.

But craft isn't the whole question. The Roses buries its virtues under an excessive amount of strong foul language — including scores of "f" words and several profanities that take the name of Jesus in vain — plus lewd sexual content and marital violence. And the affirmation of marriage at the end comes wrapped in an ironic humanist twist that undercuts it.

So our answer is plain: however skilled the filmmaking, the sheer volume of objectionable content makes this one to skip.

Theo and Ivy Rose meet in a fancy restaurant kitchen, marry, and move to Northern California, where they raise two children. He's an English architect; she's an English chef who opens a small crab restaurant.

Then the balance tips. Theo's artsy building for a sailing club collapses in a storm, and he becomes an unemployed house husband — just as Ivy's restaurant takes off and makes her an internationally renowned chef. Resentment builds. They drift apart. The only question left is which comes first: divorce, or something far worse.

Three stars, and they're earned on the screen if not on the conscience. Adapted from the novel The War of the Roses — previously filmed in 1989 — this version moves by turns from witty to scary to touching to heartwarming to dramatic, and it stays compelling nearly throughout.

The cast is deep and capable, and director Jay Roach keeps the satire's mood swings coherent: family bliss one moment, dark marital combat the next. Where the 1989 film was simply depressing, this one aims higher, closing with an actual affirmation of marriage. That the affirmation is then undercut by an ironic twist is a writing choice you may find clever or cheap — but the filmmaking around it is confident and skilled.

At its core, this is a light morality tale about how small slights in a marriage — left to fester alongside jealousy and resentment — can escalate into divorce and even the thought of murder. That's a warning worth heeding, and the film knows it, stepping back from the abyss at the end to affirm the marriage.

But the affirmation comes with an ironic humanist twist that undercuts it, so the story never quite lands where it seems to be reaching. And the moral is delivered through an excessive amount of strong foul language, lewd sexual references, and marital violence that overwhelm whatever caution the tragedy might teach.

The film also handles a homosexual restaurant employee in a politically correct way, including a joke about trysts in the parking lot, and there's a comical dig at Buddha. These are worth naming plainly and weighing as you will.

The deepest thing the movie gropes toward is real: that a marriage is worth stepping back from the edge to save. Scripture says so without irony — love "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7). The Roses can picture the ruin; it can't quite picture the healing.

There's real skill here — a witty, compelling satire with a cast to match and even a word to say about saving a marriage. But the flood of profanity, the lewd and violent content, and an ending that mocks its own best instinct put it past the line. So our answer stands: skip it. For your next movie night, try our latest family-friendly picks.