Carnage

"Snappy, nasty, deftly acted  Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter
"...fun verbal warfare cleanly filmed.  Vadim Rizov, Boxoffice Magazine

Editor's Note Director Roman Polanski teams with playwright Yasmina Reza to adapt Reza's Tony Award-winning play about four New York parents who gather for a civilized discussion that becomes anything but after their children get into a scuffle at a local park. Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy (Kate Winslet) are the parents of Zachary, a young schoolboy whose recent fight with classmate Ethan resulted in two of Ethan's teeth being broken. Convinced that they can find an amiable solution to the problem rather than dragging lawyers into the picture, Ethan's parents Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) invite Alan and Nancy to their home to discuss the matter in a comfortable setting. At first the conversation is cordial, with both sets of parents stating their own perspectives over coffee and dessert. But once the booze starts to flow and the guards come down, things begin to turn combative. As the evening wears on, both sets of parents are slinging venomous insults and engaging in underhanded behavior that makes their kids' tooth-chipping tussle look like child's play.

	John C. Reilly
	Jodie Foster
	Kate Winslet
	Christoph Waltz
	Joseph Rezwin - Voice
	Nathan Rippy - Voice
	Elvis Polanski - Co-Star
	Eliot Berger - Co-Star
	Roman Polanski - Screenwriter
	Alexandre Desplat - Composer
	Pawel Edelman - Director of Photography
	Yasmina Reza - Screenwriter
	Yasmina Reza - Source Writer
	Ralph Remstedt - Assistant Director
	Julie Adams - Voice
	Tanya Lopert - Voice
	Roman Polanski - Director

Hollywood Reporter
"Snappy, nasty, deftly acted....[CARNAGE] fully delivers the laughs and savagery of the stage piece..." 09/01/2011

Box Office
4 stars out of 5 -- "CARNAGE has many familiar Polanski elements running through it, exhibited with a career's worth of pared-down precision." 10/04/2011

Film Comment
"It's an entertaining, cathartic fantasy of bad manners....A grimacing Foster goes for it, and Reilly's easygoing routine holds the attention..." 11/01/2011

Los Angeles Times
"Not only is Polanski very much in his comfort zone with this material, he also has cast it impressively..." 12/16/2011

New York Times
"[A] swift and spry adaptation of Yasmina Reza?s play....Ms. Foster is frighteningly intense..." 12/15/2011

Movieline
"[T]he picture is a brisk, disciplined exercise: For the most part the performances are precise and cutting, and the writing has a sharpness that we don?t often see in contemporary movies..." 12/15/2011

A.V. Club
"CARNAGE bristles with tension in its superior first two acts, as conversation about the children?s misbehavior morphs unmistakably into a fevered debate about seemingly everything else." 12/15/2011

Chicago Sun-Times
3 stars out of 4 -- "Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves." 01/01/2012

Sight and Sound
"Here the power and the glee are in the uniformly excellent playing. Jodie Foster's Penelope is a revelation....John C. Reilly adds a note of misanthropic menace..." 02/01/2012

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "The cast are excellent...and the film whizzes past in peaks of exasperated laughter....CARNAGE is an acting masterclass from four of the best in the business..." 04/01/2012

Uncut
4 stars out of 5 -- "It is well performed by the leads....[CARNAGE] has a barbed and vicious undertow." 03/01/2012

Empire 8 of 10
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. - Adam Smith