This remake of the '80s divorce farce is "a piercing black comedy" that is "played with droll perfection" by Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman.

There is so much smashing going on in the riotous marriage comedy The Roses. Egos and careers crumble, whole buildings end up in ruins – and at the centre of it all is the once-blissful, now rancid marriage of Ivy and Theo Rose, played with droll perfection by Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch. The film is inspired by the Warren Adler novel, The War of the Roses, which was made into a 1989 divorce comedy with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. But this new version is revamped to hit a nerve today. Like the current Materialists, it is hyperaware of how money and success can be the root of so many evils in marriage.

Tony McNamara's screenplay, as you would expect from the writer of The Favourite and Poor Things, is a piercing black comedy. And director Jay Roach, of Meet the Parents and Meet the Fockers, is expert at finding mainstream humour in family dysfunction. Together they are a winning odd-couple team. But The Roses wouldn't have worked nearly as well without the deft, perfectly timed delivery of Colman, who once again shows herself to be a comic master, and of Cumberbatch. Not exactly known as a funny guy, he definitely is here.

The story begins near the end, with the couple's relationship so bitter that their therapist tells them the marriage is doomed. "Are you even allowed to say that?" Theo asks. But it quickly flashes back to the beginning, and for a long, witty stretch the film is a rom-com. In a prickly version of a meet-cute, Ivy and Theo encounter each other in a London restaurant where she's a chef, on the night before she's due to move away for work. He is an architect so annoyed at his colleagues that he wanders from their table into the kitchen and says he could kill himself. She says she would offer him the large knife in her hand, but she needs it to keep chopping food. They fall instantly in love.

Leap ahead 10 years and the Roses are settled in California with a young son and daughter, and we can see that their marriage has thrived on their shared sardonic humour. One perfect example: they........

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