Carnage

Directed by Roman Polanski

(R)

**

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Roman Polanski’s latest is “a textbook example of that not-always-true cliché about the unfilmability of theater,” said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. While Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning play about a parental standoff works well onstage, it feels “stiff, talky, and airless” here; even at 80 minutes, it “has draggy stretches.” After their son knocks out a schoolmate’s teeth, an upper-middle-class Brooklyn couple, played by Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz, visit the victim’s working-class parents (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster). An initially civil discussion soon disintegrates. Though “the performances are precise and cutting,” the characters are so unsympathetic that the climax provides only “the relief of finally being able to escape these unbearable individuals,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. Successful satire “requires a bit more specificity” than Reza has supplied her four status-conscious caricatures, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Lacking characters worth exploring, Carnage comes across as “a superficially provocative idea slapped onto an almost-probable situation and whipped into hyperarticulate nonsense.”