![]() Updates, 9/2: "With the filmmaking placidly seamless the cast is likewise perfect, perfect at rising to the cliches that have been written for them, pushing them just a bit over the brink of absurdity, and holding them back - which will undoubtably lead many to accuse the film, surprisingly, of not going far enough, lacking the truest bitter edge, the harshest, freshest vision of humanity," writes Daniel Kasman here in the Notebook. "As it spirals towards its amusingly messy conclusion the film loses its tightness and lapses towards drunken clichés, but Carnage is never if not watchable and enjoyable," finds Screen's Mark Adams. That aside, the film barely puts a foot wrong." Arguably, it does turn a shade too shrill - and therefore too obviously farcical - in the final stretch, once the alcohol has been brought out and the mobile phone dumped in the vase of water. "If Carnage has a flaw, it could be that Polanski's apparent sympathy for Alan at times threatens to throw out the film's delicate, four-way balance. "Polanski has rustled up a pitch-black farce of the charmless bourgeoisie that is indulgent, actorly and so unbearably tense I found myself gulping for air and praying for release," writes the Guardian's Xan Brooks. ![]() Snappy, nasty, deftly acted and perhaps the fastest paced film ever directed by a 78-year-old, fully delivers the laughs and savagery of the stage piece while entirely convincing as having been shot in New York, even though it was filmed in Paris for well-known reasons."Īnita Singh has notes from the press conference for the Telegraph. Updates: Todd McCarthy, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, is won over: "Roman Polanski has often been at his best in close quarters - the small yacht of Knife in the Water, the Warsaw ghetto of The Pianist, the house in The Ghost Writer, the apartments in Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant - so it should be no surprise that he's right at home examining the venality of the human condition in the living room of the Brooklyn apartment that serves as the setting for Carnage. It’s well-acted and giddily enjoyable, if slightly less so once the characters start to analyse their descent into barbarism." Oliver Lyttelton for the Playlist: "Two sets of parents - the liberal Michael and Penelope Longstreet ( John C Reilly and Jodie Foster) and the successful Alan and Nancy Cowan ( Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet) - meet for dinner after their young children are involved in a playground dispute, and soon all their flaws, hypocrisies and deceptions are laid bare in a drunken evening that shows the parents to be no more civilized than their progeny… There's often a darkly funny undertone to Polanski's work, but this reinforces that he's got a real knack for comedy, for perhaps the first time since Fearless Vampire Killers, and we hope he doesn't neglect that particular muscle from here on out." Even so, Lyttelton then explains why he's giving Carnage a C+.ģ out of 5 stars from the Telegraph's David Gritten: "Waltz, as the rudest man in the room, gets the best lines. As with his well-acted but somewhat embalmed 1994 adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, the director hasn't broken a sweat trying to Polanskify material that speaks very much to his sensibilities in the first place - it's not hard to imagine the beleaguered auteur filtering his own exasperation at the hypocrisies of the bourgeois moral police, however obliquely, through that of Reza." 2.5 out of 4 stars. "It is, in the final event, very much the play that critics and audiences swarmed around from its Paris debut in 2006," writes Guy Lodge at In Contention, "and such fans' relative satisfaction or disappointment with it will hinge largely on their individual response to the wholly refreshed cast. "But 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." "The gloves come off early and the social graces disintegrate on cue in Carnage, which spends 79 minutes observing, and encouraging, the steady erosion of niceties between two married couples," writes Justin Chang in Variety.
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