Knife in the Water (Roman Polanski, 1962)

7/10
After Truffaut's first, Polanski's first. I like "closed room" settings, so Polanski putting a man, his wife, a drifter they picked up and a knife on a sailboat appealed to me. It did drag a bit - the tension builds slowly (sometimes not at all) and comes to an inevitable climax. I won't spoil the ending but I did wish that it had been done differently. As it is, I liked it, but I thought there was something that could've been done to make it more powerful. The soundtrack is excellent, a weird jazzy thing that sometimes seems ill-fitting, but I liked it.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011)

9/10
Adapted (and probably virtually unchanged) from a play, Carnage features two sets of parents in one room of one house for its entire running time, discussing the fall-out from one parents' son hitting the others' in the face with a stick. In very Bunuelian fashion, things eventually descend into chaos and hysteria. If the trajectory is predictable, it's a heck of a lot of fun getting there. John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet are all fantastic, perfectly cast, and clearly revelling in what is patently an actor's movie. I'm giving it extra marks for being that most rare thing - an English-language comedy that appeals to adults without being juvenile (mostly). I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in the theatre.