Unlike Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polański does not linger on the cruelty of children [in Carnage]. The quartet of actors delivers top-notch performances with Waltz confirming his creative flair using a grotesque repertoire made up of sudden chuckles and grunts

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2023

Polanski’s film is fast-paced, deceptively simple, carefully arranged, and often hilarious in its observations about social decorum and the hypocrisies therein.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 23, 2023

It’s a sharply written, often times laugh out loud funny, and occasionally repetitive performance-driven drama.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 19, 2022

Carnage becomes rather tiresome, its goal apparently being merely to prove that respectability masks a heart of darkness.

| Feb 28, 2021

That script is partly to blame for the problems, as well, but the actors aren't helping matters.

| Feb 10, 2021

The real star of the film, perhaps, is Christoph Waltz.

| Original Score: 1.5/4.0 | Sep 4, 2020

Polanski doesn't shy away from the inherent theatricality in the conceit of having four characters stuck in an apartment, and is wise to actually make a feature of it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 21, 2020

The evening dissolves into irrational outbursts tinged with misogyny, homophobia and racism.

| Jun 10, 2020

The linchpin of the drama is fairly one-note: beneath civility lies cruelty. And there is perhaps a bit too much New Yorker-style, upper-middle self-satisfaction in that rather thin insight.

| Jan 16, 2020

Overall Carnage is really funny comedy and worth seeing.

| Original Score: A | Jan 11, 2020

A deep meditation on the human condition and the fine line that separates social convention from simple tribalism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 7, 2019

Roman Polanski's major coup is not just in telling us such a universally resonant tale, but in gathering such a brilliant group of actors in a one space, and letting them loose at each other.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 27, 2019

It's like being realistically stuck in a room with four increasingly unpleasant people, listening to an argument that we can neither empathize with nor enter ourselves.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 8, 2019

Carnage" visually never feels stagey, expertly capturing the diametrically opposed emotions of dueling characters within a scene often in a single frame.

| Jan 8, 2019

As painful as it was for the two couples in this story to meet and spend, it seems, 80 minutes together, it was even more brutal for the audience.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 4, 2019

Smart, dark, uncomfortable yet somehow endlessly watchable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 13, 2018

I'm not convinced it's particularly deep or insightful, but there is some enjoyment to be had from watching four actors at the top of their game get to where they do get to.

| Aug 31, 2018

Carnage is,... worth seeing for Jodie Foster's first major performance in years. As a woman utterly convinced of her own superiority and righteousness, Foster gives us a very welcome reminder of her talent and her fearlessness.

| Aug 6, 2018

It plays like Edward Albee's classic "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" rewritten by the staff of "Frasier" into something a little less threatening.

| Mar 3, 2018

Roman Polanski, adapting a play by Yasmina Reza into a Brooklyn kammerspiel, turns Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" into a non-fantastic comedic farce of banal bourgeois pettiness.

| Nov 16, 2017