Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Barbara and Oliver Rose live happily as a married couple. When Barbara starts to wonder what life would be like without Oliver and likes what she sees, the two begin a campaign to force each other to leave their house, with their divorce lawyer D'Amato caught in the middle.
The War of the Roses is a darkly comic masterpiece distinguished by its unflinching, escalating black comedy about marital warfare taken to its logical extreme. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner deliver ferociously committed performances, perfectly pitched between savage comedy and genuine menace, with Danny DeVito as an ideal deadpan narrator. The film's novelty lies in its refusal to soften the premise—it follows the destructive spiral to a genuinely shocking, bleakly poetic ending that was audacious for mainstream Hollywood. Danny DeVito's direction keeps the visual style functional but occasionally inspired. The plot is essentially a single sustained escalation with limited structural complexity, keeping it from a top mark in that category.