Set in contemporary Brooklyn, New York, Carnage centers on two pairs of parents, one of whose child has hurt the other at a public park, who meet to discuss the matter in a civilized manner. However, as the evening goes on, the parents become increasingly childish, resulting in the evening devolving into chaos.
Reviews
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"Polanski underlines the pettiness of the characters’ behaviour. But all the way through you’ll have been laughing at their childishness, casual cruelty and ugly self-righteousness. It’s hideously accurate."
03/02/2012
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The Times
Kate Muri
"I did not see the original play, and although the live frisson is missing, Polanski has not merely set up his camera and walked off. He creeps around the room, peering over shoulders, closing in on a twitching check muscle, and pulling out to show the body language of embarrassment. My only doubt is the translation from the original French; there’s an overacting grandeur here that real Americans would eschew."
03/02/2012
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Channel 4 Film
Terry Mulcahy
"A tight film expertly paced by Polanski who demonstrates a talent for tickling ribs that will probably come as a surprise to many ... Skewering the upper middle-classes with wry observations of their neuroses and petty obsessions, Polanski just about manages to sidestep snootiness and stays in the realm of the cheeky.
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03/02/2012
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Empire Magazine
Adam Smith
"Irresistibly malicious."
30/01/2012
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
"It isn't just the acting that should make your evening. It is the impish and highly skilled way Polanski directs this ineffably middle-class quartet, mostly in one very accurately furnished New York apartment, as they tear each other to pieces, much as Luis Buñuel was wont to do with his bourgeois nincompoops."
03/02/2012
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"We know Carnage has the wicked glint of trash. We know we shouldn’t strictly be giggling or goggling at the spectacle of a Titanic star throwing up, or of two-time Oscar-winner Ms Foster unravelling like a ball of wool clawed by rabid kittens. This drama is undignified for everyone, including us. That’s the fun. "
02/02/2012
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"Out comes the booze and off come the gloves. Polanski turns up the emotional heat to the point where we get a great cathartic outburst of repressed opinions. It used to be nudity that shocked us; now it’s hearing nice liberal-minded people give vent to illiberal thoughts.
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01/01/1900
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The Observer
Philip French
"Carnage belongs in a dramatic tradition of exposure, misogyny and painful-truth telling that descends from Strindberg through O'Neill to Osborne and Albee. It also fits neatly into Polanski's oeuvre as he approaches his 79th year.
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05/02/2012
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The Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
"Carnage is effective not because it reveals something we don't already know — it doesn't — but because it makes us shake our heads in recognition of behavior we've seen in others and, heaven forbid, even in ourselves."
16/12/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Nicholas Barber
"Maybe something has been lost in translation. Carnage is billed as a Spanish-Polish-German-French production, which could be why its New Yorkers don't ring true, but the contrivances we might forgive in a theatre are impossible to get past in a film ... Polanski and Reza have made a sly black comedy about people who keep their emotions in check, followed by a silly farce about people who do the opposite.
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05/02/2012
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Total Film
Matt Glasby
"The cast are excellent, particularly the chaps, and the film whizzes past in peaks of exasperated laughter, but it remains intrinsically stagey."
23/01/2012
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gibley
"Claustrophobia, and a performance by Waltz that evokes callousness without caricature, are the film's greatest assets ... But I missed Tamsin Greig, who played on stage the role now given to Winslet. Greig's vulnerability challenged the cruelty of the text: she was a lovely bag of nerves whose sanity hung genuinely in the balance. Even under fire, Winslet is formidable."
02/02/2012
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"Some serious injury here, but not carnage."
02/02/2012
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The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
"The script may be full of banal, simplistic observations, but Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C Reilly and, especially, Christoph Waltz are all so deliciously unpleasant, it’s hard not to derive some satisfaction from watching them be nasty to one another for 80 minutes."
02/02/2012
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Scotland on Sunday
Siobhan Synnot
"Carnage is not a bit interested in naturalism: it’s chokka with ideas and symbolism about how rapidly our veneer of civility gives way to aggression. That’s why they manage to get fighting drunk after 20 minutes and two fingers of whisky. Movie boozers haven’t been as lightweight as this since Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday."
29/01/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
"Polanski has given us apartment-bound carnage before, in Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant, but this is the first time he’s played it for laughs. The result is just as insignificant as the feud it depicts, but in the heat of the moment, it’s equally exhilarating."
03/02/2012
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Time Magazine
Richard Corliss
"At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he’s perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it."
14/12/2011
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The New York Times
A. O. Scott
"Should not really be a movie. It should be a parlor game ... consisting of a four-person reading of the play around a table, which sounds like more fun than watching Mr. Polanski’s film. But the idea could be refined further into a brutal amalgam of Twister, charades and contract bridge. We’ll need a dish of cold cobbler, a bottle of good Scotch, a cellphone, repressed hostility and vaguely liberal attitudes. Let’s play! I’ll be the hamster."
16/12/2011
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The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
"God of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, was one of those fashionable skits that tickle the liberal consciences of audiences just enough to last them through dinner, and not even Polanski can find grit in its silly provocations—ooh, look, Kate Winslet just threw up over a book! An art book, would you believe? So much for culture!
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19/12/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"The four actors plug away at the awful (translated) dialogue, gamely trying to whip up a froth from this annoying and implausible situation. Foster suffers the worst, her mean slot of a mouth nearly as ridiculous as her character's occasional stabs at piety. You honestly wonder what she could have seen in the part to enjoy, apart from trying to thump Reilly's lummox of a husband. The whole affair is so airless, and joyless, that you soon resent every minute it's detaining you."
03/02/2012
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