Carnage

'Carnage' MPAA rating: R for language Running time: 1hour, 20 minutes Playing: At ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood; the Landmark, West Los Angeles

Yasmina Reza, the Tony Award-winning French dramatist whose stage hits include "Art" and "God of Carnage," has a new work out this month but it isn't a play. Reza has published a new novel in France titled "Heureux les Heureux. " The 190-page book follows 18 different characters and is structured as a series of monologues. The title, which can be roughly translated to "Happy Are the Happy," is a quote from Jorge Luis Borges's "Fragments from an Apocryphal Gospel. " The novel has received enthusiastic reviews in France.

In "Carnage," the film adaptation of the award-winning play "God of Carnage," two couples gather to discuss an altercation their sons have had, in which one boy injured the other with a stick. Virtually all the action takes place in the living room of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance) as they go over the incident with Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, who also earned a Globe nod)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Sony, $30.99; Blu-ray, $40.99 Director David Fincher and screenwriter Steven Zaillian adapt Stieg Larsson's bestseller "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" into a sophisticated and gripping thriller, sporting excellent lead performances by Daniel Craig as a disgraced reporter and Rooney Mara as a punk hacker. Larsson's story of a gruesome missing-person's case is gratuitously violent at times, and the film runs a little too long — in large part because it goes through about four endings before finally lurching to a stop.

Regarding the headline "Gun Play" and the eight photos of people with firearms on Page 19 of your "Sneaks '89" movie previews (Jan. 19): It is reality, not a movie fiction, that people are dying daily from unlimited access to firearms. Death by gun is routine in Los Angeles; children are dead in Stockton. Movies and TV glamorize guns--and writers, directors and producers should bear some responsibility for the carnage. DR. and MRS. L. M. ROSEN Santa Monica

"Carnage" SBS Productions U.S. release: Dec. 16 The premise Ethan Longstreet (Eliot Berger), age 11, has formed a gang at his Brooklyn school but has excluded classmate Zachary Cowan (Elvis Polanski), also age 11. When Zachary confronts him, Ethan taunts Zachary and continues to keep him out of the group. Zachary responds to this rejection by hitting Ethan in the mouth with a stick, knocking out two teeth. Ethan's parents, Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly)

When stage-bound plays become cinematic, expanding them to the broader canvas that film allows is often the order of the day. But not with Roman Polanski and not with "Carnage. " In fact, one of the things that attracted the veteran director to Yasmina Reza's award-winning "God of Carnage" was the chance to make a film in the real time of the excruciating evening two couples — Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz — spend in a Brooklyn apartment. So not only is "Carnage" not opened up, it feels even more intensely focused on its quartet of protagonists than the play was. The tight close-ups of cinematographer Pawel Edelman, the way his camera moves within the detailed living space designed by Dean Tavoularis, adds to the let-me-out-of-here claustrophobia of the scenario co-written by Reza and Polanski.

Yasmina Reza never planned to make a film of her international hit play "God of Carnage," a hair-trigger drama about a playground scuffle between two boys that escalates into a bitingly funny, primal struggle among their parents. But when a longtime friend proposed making a movie, the Paris-based playwright knew exactly the type of director the film needed: a master of macabre humor, an expert at raising the tension inside tight psychological spaces, a connoisseur of the darkest recesses of the human heart.

Reporting from New York — It's almost evening when the much-honored Broadway cast of Yasmina Reza's "God of Carnage" finishes rehearsal in a 42nd Street studio and moves across the room to talk about its forthcoming reunion at Los Angeles' Ahmanson Theatre. Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden are back in the roles for which each was nominated for a 2009 Tony award. The play, translated from the French by Christopher Hampton, took home Tonys for best play, actress Harden and director Matthew Warchus.

It's a dog-eat-dog world in "Carnage," Roman Polanski's film about a playground brawl between two boys that mutates into a psychological knock-down between two sets of parents. In one corner are Penelope (Jodie Foster), a high-minded liberal writer, and her husband, Michael (John C. Reilly), a seemingly easygoing housewares wholesaler. In the other are Nancy (Kate Winslet), a high-strung investment broker, and Alan (Christoph Waltz), a corporate lawyer noisily preoccupied with taking his clients' cellphone calls.

President Obama on Tuesday ruled out a unilateral U.S. military campaign to support the beleaguered rebels in Syria, calling such an operation "much more complicated" than the NATO-led air war launched to help protect civilians during the civil war in Libya last year. At a White House news conference, Obama described the shelling and other attacks on civilians and rebel fighters by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad as "heartbreaking and outrageous. " But Obama made it clear that he is not prepared to send U.S. forces to try to stop the carnage in Syrian cities and towns, or to help overthrow Assad, as some Republicans in Congress have urged.

  A new round of fierce clashes and shelling was reported Wednesday in the battered Syrian city of Homs, while fresh recriminations flew aboutRussia'ssuddenly prominent role in the crisis. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin deplored what he called a growing "cult of violence" in international affairs, and emphasized that countries should have the opportunity to decide their own fates without interference from outside forces. "Of course, we condemn any instance of violence, whatever side this comes from, but one cannot behave like a bull in a china shop," Putin said at a meeting in Moscow with Russian religious leaders, Interfax news agency reported.

Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly fight over how it ought to be done in "Carnage. " George Clooney in "The Descendants," Matt Damon in "We Bought a Zoo" and Sandra Bullock in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" are worried about doing it alone. Viola Davis does it for other people in "The Help. " Demián Bichir does it as an immigrant in "A Better Life. " Nick Nolte is trying to do it over sober in "Warrior. " And Tilda Swinton has blood-soaked proof that she has done it all terribly wrong in "We Need to Talk About Kevin.

In "Carnage," the film adaptation of the award-winning play "God of Carnage," two couples gather to discuss an altercation their sons have had, in which one boy injured the other with a stick. Virtually all the action takes place in the living room of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (played by John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster, who received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance) as they go over the incident with Alan and Nancy Cowan (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, who also earned a Globe nod)

"Carnage" SBS Productions U.S. release: Dec. 16 The premise Ethan Longstreet (Eliot Berger), age 11, has formed a gang at his Brooklyn school but has excluded classmate Zachary Cowan (Elvis Polanski), also age 11. When Zachary confronts him, Ethan taunts Zachary and continues to keep him out of the group. Zachary responds to this rejection by hitting Ethan in the mouth with a stick, knocking out two teeth. Ethan's parents, Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly)

"Carnage" production designer Dean Tavoularis also helped create the look of some of the classics of 1970s cinema. 'Carnage' He designed a comfortable but lived-in Brooklyn apartment for Roman Polanski's version of the dark stage comedy. 'The Godfather Part II' Tavoularis won an Oscar for his production design of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic, creating Sicily and New York in the early 1900s and Cuba and Lake Tahoe in the late 1950s. 'Apocalypse Now' For Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic, Tavoularis designed sets that included a French plantation and Col. Kurtz's jungle command post.

When "God of Carnage," Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning comedy of bad bourgeois behavior, opens at the Ahmanson Theatre on April 13, it will feature the same cast that won near universal acclaim when the play debuted on Broadway in 2009 ? Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden ? a rare instance in which an entire Broadway ensemble reprises their roles in Los Angeles. For the producers, getting the stars ? literally and figuratively ? to align for a second time was no simple task given four respected actors' professional and personal lives.

In the Actor's Gang's "Carnage, A Comedy," the marriage of right-wing religion and the military-industrial-entertainment complex has produced a brood of apocalyptic children: hate-mongering radio hosts, bomb-throwing fanatics, private militias and sub-prime lenders. So far, so familiar.

For over four decades, Oscar-winning production designer Dean Tavoularis has taken audiences to other worlds and times, whether it's the bleak Depression-era Texas of Arthur Penn's 1967 classic "Bonnie and Clyde," the mob universe of the Corleone family in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" trilogy or the mysterious, shadowy jungle compounds in Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic "Apocalypse Now. " After spending the past decade concentrating on...

The art of adaptation, as the rash of movies derived from plays this season attests, is never easy. The best artistic looters of all time — Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians — recognized that independent vision is everything. Borrowing didn't inhibit them in least. Their goal, of course, wasn't to duplicate but to create something autonomous. Heck, Shakespeare wasn't beyond taking a freehand with history itself. Contemporary purloiners tend to be less independent. They struggle under a self-imposed obligation of faithfulness.