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France, Germany, Poland · 2011
Rated R · 1h 20m
Director Roman Polanski
Starring Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, John C. Reilly
Genre Comedy, Drama
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When some roughhousing between two 11-year-old boys named Zachary and Ethan erupts into real violence, Ethan loses two teeth. Zachary's parents invite Ethan's parents to their Brooklyn apartment try to smooth things over. However, what begins as a polite meeting among adults descends into finger-pointing, tantrums and insults.
In the final stage of the film's programmatic chaos, Alan announces that he believes in the god of carnage and cops to the pleasure he gets from watching people deviate from social convention and tear one another apart. You'd have to agree with him in order to embrace this film - there's nothing else to see here.
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
The performances are lusty and concerted, but they remain just that - performances, of the sort that may make you feel you should stagger to your feet at the end and applaud. If so, resist.
One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
Polanski struggles to make the material more cinematic, toying with clever mise-en-scene to showcase the mounting tensions. However, Carnage repeatedly suffers from an internal tension between the possibilities of two media at odds with each other.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Carnage suffers from a common problem that afflicts many stage-to-screen adaptations: too much artifice and contrivance.
Watch the director's 1976 "The Tenant," and you'll know he can do more with less.
The real battle in Roman Polanski's brisk, fitfully amusing adaptation of Yasmina Reza's popular play is a more formal clash between stage minimalism and screen naturalism, as this acid-drenched four-hander never shakes off a mannered, hermetic feel that consistently betrays its theatrical origins.
Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
Snappy, nasty, deftly acted and perhaps the fastest paced film ever directed by a 78-year-old, this adaptation of Yasmina Reza's award-winning play God of Carnage fully delivers the laughs and savagery of the stage piece.
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