The film industry has an insatiable appetite for stories. You only have to look at the last decade or so at its cannibalistic attitude towards remakes, in its quest to make even more money from films that have gone before.

It's kind of amusing however that if the project happened to be a play in another life, then a film version somehow has more artistic integrity. Obviously the musical genre translates well from stage to screen as classics like The Wizard of Oz, South Pacific, Cabaret etc prove.

Getting a drama with a lot of dialogue right however, is a trickier proposition. But as the likes of A Few Good Men, Glengarry Glen Ross and Frost/Nixon have shown, it can be done.

Roman Polanski's latest film is based on Yasmina Reza's 2006 play, God of Carnage, and it's about as play-like as a film can get.

When 11 year-old Zachery Cowan (Elvis Polanski) hits another boy in the face with a branch, the parents of both sets of children decide to meet up to discuss the issue.

So Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael Longstreet (John C. Reilly) invite the Cowan's – Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz) – over to their New York apartment.

At first both couples behave like mature and concerned parents. But as the meeting goes on, guards most definitely come down and fingers of blame are thrust and parried in all directions. Alliances shift from one person to the next as drink-fuelled rants come thick and fast. The whole scenario gets extremely messy, in more ways than one.

Next time let me organise who we swing with OK?

As soon as the initial opening scene of the boy attacking someone with a branch ends with the opening credits, Polanski locks the audience as well as the two couples away in the small apartment for the duration. In doing so, there's a risk that such restricted confines could bring on a sensation of claustrophobia. Fortunately, the richness of both the dialogue and the characters allows for constant stimulation.

The casting does feel on the odd side. It's difficult to actually describe but there's something not quite right about seeing Foster and Winslet, heavyweights of the acting world, battling it out on screen. They relish the challenge however, as do their male co-stars. All four of them appear to enjoy onionising on screen i.e. the ability to reveal layers of their characters a bit at a time.

Towards the end, the film reaches farcical proportions. Again, this quartet of actors appear to thoroughly enjoy letting their hair down and having some fun with their characters, particularly Winslet.

Although there are some eerie similarities between this and the director's classic Rosemary's Baby (both are not only set in NYC, but also in apartment buildings where the characters very rarely leave), Polanski does very little here, except point the camera and let his more than capable cast get on with it. Unlike much of his previous work, it's hardly a cinematic title, but maybe he's just reaching that time of life where he just wants to slow down a bit, and for that no one can really blame him.

Carnage is a two-pronged winner in that it serves up a deliciously sharp script, for a bunch of actors who clearly had a ball delivering it.