The episodes are uninteresting and the characters one-dimensional. Unlike the multicharacter tapestries of such filmmakers as Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, the pretentious whole here is ultimately less than the sum of the parts.
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A truly remarkable and compassionate debut from a savvy, self-confident filmmaker. No bull.
What emerges is an astonishing debut, unlike anything else you'll see this year.
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.
Audience patience undergoes a far more brutal butchering than anything onscreen in Delphine Gleize's wildly over-reaching feature debut, Carnage.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Funny, sad, and tinged with magic realism, this ambitious comedy-drama is as original as it is nimbly directed.
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
An amazingly self-assured movie, it percolates with themes and ideas, all held together by the gift of the bull's parts.
The film becomes a complex tissue of intersecting lives, but Gleize handles each developing story with amazing ease, and the fabulist touches are the icing on a very tasty cake.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.
Gleize establishes her multiple plotlines fairly cleanly, though once disentangled, the individual stories don't offer enough incident to be meaningful. They don't mean that much all put together, either, but Carnage is still highly watchable, thanks to Gleize's keen eye.