In keeping with its predecessors, the duo’s latest colors its humor with a strain of wistful regret rooted in their thorny feelings about transitioning into middle age. For this fourth and ostensibly final installment, the bickering couple (Coogan arrogant and condescending Brydon cheery and patient) enjoy fine meals and show off their imitative vocal skills, here highlighted by Coogan doing a pitch-perfect Ray Winstone as King Henry VIII. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon follow the path first traversed by Odysseus in The Trip To Greece, once again engaging in the witty banter and dueling celebrity impressions that have become the hallmark of this Michael Winterbottom-stewarded comedy series.

A nighttime race through Manhattan in an old-school sports car is the material’s comedic high point, and contributes to the warmth and affection that Coppola showers upon her metropolitan setting, here envisioned as a dreamy wonderland full of intrigue, adventure and alternately enervating and enlivening domesticity. Seemingly riffing on Coppola’s own famous dad Francis, Murray is a charming force of nature as an incorrigible lothario at once devoted to his mother-of-two kid and wholly, hilariously consumed with himself, and his performance does much to enliven this breezy saga about Laura’s mid-life crisis. Though the results aren’t as dynamic as their prior collaboration, Coppola’s fizzy romantic drama nonetheless finds its headliner in outstanding form as Felix, the suave ladies-man father to Laura (Rashida Jones), with whom he embarks on an investigation into the possible two-timing proclivities of her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans). With On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola reunites with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray for another odyssey involving a young woman and an older man.

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