Carnage
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 16, 2011 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
61
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
25
Mixed:
15
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 12, 2012
Think "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," but then think fun. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrJan 12, 2012
The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads. Read full review
83
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJan 11, 2012
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. Read full review
80
EmpireAdam SmithJan 30, 2012
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. Read full review
80
Boxoffice MagazineVadim RizovOct 4, 2011
Relatively light-hearted for a Polanski film (no one dies), Carnage is fun verbal warfare cleanly filmed. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 30, 2011
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. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsJan 14, 2012
When a man whose wife was killed by cultists invites us to laugh at life's absurdities, the particulars are almost incidental. Read full review
75
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJan 14, 2012
Among them, Polanski's four-person cast boasts four Oscars and eight more nominations, so these are big-league actors who are capable of carrying a film such as this through its occasional miscalculations. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 12, 2012
A lot of people have no use for Carnage, especially in its unapologetically hemmed-in film version. And yet there isn't a sloppily or casually considered shot in any of the 80 minutes. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertJan 11, 2012
This is not a particularly memorable film, but Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves. Read full review
75
MovielineStephanie ZacharekDec 15, 2011
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. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedDec 14, 2011
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. Read full review
75
New York PostLou LumenickSep 30, 2011
Fast, furious and often funny. But no blood is truly shed (except literally in a playground fight during the opening credits). Read full review
75
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSep 28, 2011
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. Read full review
70
Chicago ReaderJ.R. JonesJan 12, 2012
The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinDec 27, 2011
A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirDec 16, 2011
Seeing these four actors launching Reza's zingers at each other at high speed is pretty much worth the price of admission all by itself, and one thing you always know about Polanski is that he won't waste your time. Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 15, 2011
Not only is Polanski very much in his comfort zone with this material, he also has cast it impressively, staying away from any of the actors who played the parts in either its London or New York productions and finding players who match up well with Carnage's juicy dialogue. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJan 11, 2012
The script is chockablock with al dente amusements – obvious targets still make for wickedly funny one-liners – and the German actor Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is terrific as the only parent unburdened by decorum. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 16, 2011
If this was a quintessential Polanski movie, something malign would reside inside its heart: The sitcom would explode its boundaries. The movie is called Carnage, but the carnivores on display are toothless. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubNathan RabinDec 14, 2011
By the time everyone in Carnage has revealed themselves, we're left not with flawed human beings, but with monsters of banality whose company represents a brutal form of punishment in itself. Read full review
67
IndieWireEric KohnOct 4, 2011
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. Read full review
65
NPRBob MondelloDec 16, 2011
But it does mean you're always aware that you're watching filmed theater - a scripted pressure-cooker where playability is being allowed to trump plausibility as theoretically cultivated adults morph into savages - going from civility to carnage in 80 minutes flat. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia PuigDec 15, 2011
While the talented quartet play these hypocritical sorts with finesse, the story grows tiresome, its cynical point made early and often. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 12, 2011
Carnage suffers from a common problem that afflicts many stage-to-screen adaptations: too much artifice and contrivance. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicKerry LengelDec 29, 2011
If anything, Carnage does too little to adapt to the new medium, and the result is a film that makes its audience feel as trapped as its characters. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierDec 15, 2011
It's a shame neither actress can truly "go for the jugular," as Alan says at one point. This is a work that would allow for it. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfDec 13, 2011
Watch the director's 1976 "The Tenant," and you'll know he can do more with less. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumDec 15, 2011
In such an audience stroker, where casting is everything (on Broadway, James Gandolfini brought exciting menace to the role of Mr. Longstreet), Winslet and Waltz jell while Foster and Reilly flounder, unable to make sense of what kind of people they're supposed to be. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleAmy BiancolliJan 12, 2012
The film isn't half as deep as intended, but parts of it are very funny - someone actually barfs onto a stack of art books - and the parts that aren't may as well be. Read full review
50
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezJan 12, 2012
The entire point of Carnage is to poke fun at the fragile civility of the upper-middle class - they're all animals inside! - but how much more fun would this material have been if the story hadn't been about polite white people? Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenDec 23, 2011
Although the subject, school bullying, is as fresh as today's headlines, the treatment isn't. Despite the efforts of an impressive cast, the film starts out stale and then just gets tedious. Read full review
50
SlateDana StevensDec 16, 2011
Stiff, talky, and airless, a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater. Read full review
50
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 16, 2011
The film version of Carnage hasn't just lost God from its title, it's lost the laughs from the play that brought it life. Read full review
50
Village VoiceKarina LongworthDec 13, 2011
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. Read full review
50
The New YorkerAnthony LaneDec 12, 2011
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. Read full review
50
VarietyJustin ChangSep 30, 2011
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. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 15, 2011
I was put off by the acting, or more properly by the spectacle of good actors dutifully following leaden direction, and equally by the writing, which is as thin as the veneer of civilization it purports to peel back. Read full review
40
The New York TimesA.O. ScottDec 15, 2011
As a portrait of anxious, status-conscious Brooklyn parents living in a chiaroscuro of self-righteousness and guilt, Carnage misses its mark badly. Read full review
40
TimeRichard CorlissDec 15, 2011
At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it. Read full review
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