Carnage (2011)

Director Roman Polanski

This comic miniature sees Roman Polanski bring his knack for claustrophobic dramas played out in enclosed spaces to French writer Yasmina Reza’s play ‘The God of Carnage’, moving the action from bourgeois Paris to middle-class Brooklyn.

It’s a captive, caustic exercise in confinement and hysteria as a couple, Nancy (Kate Winslet), a personality-free, high-flying financial type, and Alan (Christoph Waltz), a harried executive, come knocking at the home of Penelope (Jodie Foster), a self-consciously liberal writer, and Michael (John C Reilly), an amiable peddler of ‘flush mechanisms’, to discuss a fight between their kids. Each couple attempts diplomacy, but words become weapons, prejudices rise to the surface and the evening collapses into a storm of anger, vomit, drunkenness and violence. Brief, brutal and barmy. - Dave Calhoun / Time Out London