Boston Globe by Ty Burr

The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun.

Tampa Bay Times by Steve Persall

Carnage gives Polanski the best opportunity to express his devilish sense of humor in decades, proving again that comedy really is tragedy happening to someone else.

Boxoffice Magazine

Relatively light-hearted for a Polanski film (no one dies), Carnage is fun verbal warfare cleanly filmed.

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.

Boxoffice Magazine by Vadim Rizov

Relatively light-hearted for a Polanski film (no one dies), Carnage is fun verbal warfare cleanly filmed.

Empire by Adam Smith

A quartet of pitch-perfect performances from a cast uniformly at its career best, together with a director on shockingly mischievous top form, this is a shot of pure, exhilarating cinematic malice. And if nothing else, it contains the most surprising puking sequence since Monsieur Creosote.

New York Post by Lou Lumenick

Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits).

Slant Magazine by Ed Gonzalez

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.

Observer by Rex Reed

Scathing and funny and cynical about contemporary society and the hypocritical way we live now, Carnage may not be the dream movie I expected, but it has a dream cast of pure, unimpeachable ensemble perfection.

Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek

Is it entertainment? Is it satire? Is it art? It's probably a little of all three, and yet ultimately not quite enough of any.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

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.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

Watch the director's 1976 "The Tenant," and you'll know he can do more with less.

Village Voice

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.

Variety by Justin Chang

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.