movie review anna karenina

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Anna Karenina – review

T om Stoppard, a fluent and sensitive adaptor, has made a distinguished job of carving a workable screenplay from Tolstoy's 950-page novel, and Joe Wright has found a distinctive way of bringing it to the screen with Keira Knightley as Anna, Jude Law as her middle-aged, cuckolded husband, Karenin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as her dashing lover, Count Vronsky. The last serious attempt to film Anna Karenina was by Bernard Rose in 1997, a lumbering work shot largely on Russian locations in the style of Dr Zhivago , with Sophie Marceau hopelessly inadequate as Anna, James Fox inexpressive as Karenin and Sean Bean virile in a rather unaristocratic way as Vronsky.

Having felt with some justification that he hadn't done justice to this towering masterpiece, Rose subsequently set about making innovative, low-budget versions of lesser Tolstoy fictions. In 2000 he turned The Death of Ivan Ilyich into a bitter tale of Hollywood as Ivans xtc . Then, in 2008, he transposed The Kreutzer Sonata , the bleak story of a disastrous marriage, from tsarist Russia to present-day California. This past week the Venice festival hosted the premiere of Boxing Day , in which Rose relocates Tolstoy's Master and Man, the tale of an unscrupulous property developer, from the steppes of 19th-century Russia to contemporary Colorado.

Famous for his highly accomplished adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet, Wright may have come to a similar conclusion about Anna Karenina , ie that the last thing serious moviegoers are looking for is another conventional version of a familiar literary classic. So he decided (apparently after Stoppard had completed his screenplay) to stage his Anna in and around a Russian theatre in the 1870s. His intention was to create a large-scale image of upper-class tsarist society. This symbolic theatre is a place of dramatic performance and moral judgment, a forum where aristocrats gather to see and be seen, to observe and to censure. It is not clear where the notion came from, but one infers that the thought struck Wright after his disappointing discovery that all the obvious locations for the film had become so familiar that something was desperately needed to justify and enliven his project.

There are, however, certain illustrious cinematic precedents for what he has done. These include Max Ophüls setting Lola Montès , his biography of the 19th-century adventuress, in a touring circus where the ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) unfolds her story in flashback; Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War ironically presenting the first world war as an end-of-pier entertainment on the Brighton seafront; and Raoul Ruiz's Le temps retrouvé , which draws its basic narrative from the final volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu , but encompasses the whole sequence of novels in a kaleidoscopic film that captures a world and an era while playing Proust the writer against Proust the participant.

Wright's movie is a dazzling affair, a highly stylised treatment of a realistic novel, superbly designed by Sarah Greenwood and edited by Melanie Ann Oliver, with rich photography by Seamus McGarvey, sumptuous costumes by Jacqueline Durran and a highly romantic Tchaikovskian score by Dario Marianelli, all previous Wright collaborators. The theatre stage with its oil lamp footlights is sometimes a real stage with 19th-century flats and sometimes a venue for actual events such as the provincial racecourse where Count Vronsky has his terrible fall. The pit of the auditorium becomes a Moscow ballroom where Anna seduces Vronsky away from Kitty on the dancefloor, an opera house and the St Petersburg council chamber where Karenin conducts his business.

Other scenes take place in the wings and up among the flies above the stage. At an important dramatic point, Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), the awkward, honest landowner, a character close to Tolstoy himself, is rejected by his future wife, Kitty. He makes his exit from the back of the theatre, the giant doors opening up on to the real countryside, at once announcing his rejection of city life and his embracing of his responsibility to agriculture and to his peasants on his estate.

The movie version has to jettison a great deal of the book's essential digressions into politics and social affairs, but it does well by its core issue. This is, of course, the presentation and examination of love in its many forms – the destructive romantic passion of Anna for Vronsky (with its sense of the closeness of sexual love to murder); the happy, amoral amorousness of her brother, Oblonsky; the gentle companionate love of Levin for Kitty; the cold, possessive detachment of Karenin – and it is forceful, if obvious, on the operation of the double standard in society. "I'd call if she broke the law," one society matron remarks of ostracising Anna, "but she broke the rules ."

The operatic, balletic, theatrical style is less effective, however, when it comes to intimate and reflective moments, certainly in the scenes involving Taylor-Johnson's pallid, unalluring Vronsky. Still, Knightley's Anna has the right combination of passion, confusion, cruelty and near madness, and there's a brilliant moment (which comes out of the novel) where she reveals her physical revulsion for her husband by angrily criticising his irritating habit of cracking his knuckles.

Yet it has to be said that the film is only occasionally touching and rarely truly moving. The death of the wheel-tapper, accidentally trapped under a train, is infinitely more affecting and memorable than Anna's suicide that it is carefully set up to foreshadow. This has something to do with the stylised presentation. Our constant admiration for Wright's virtuosity, initially attractive and exciting, ends up as a major distraction. This kind of extreme theatricality is not necessarily unsuited to cinema, but it should not become a barrier to emotional involvement.

• Drama films
• The Observer
• Keira Knightley
• Leo Tolstoy
• Tom Stoppard

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Degrees of Infidelity to Tolstoy’s Heroine

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By Terrence Rafferty

• Nov. 2, 2012

IT isn’t easy to be faithful. Anna Karenina, for example, the title heroine of the magisterial 1877 novel by Leo Tolstoy, thinks herself happy enough with her distinguished husband, her sweet-tempered young son and her impeccable standing in the highest levels of St. Petersburg society, until she meets a dashing cavalry officer and gives it all up for him. Her infidelity is not casual or discreet, as it is for other respectable women in her set, but helpless, urgent, terrifyingly intense; she doesn’t know what hit her. The infidelity of the many filmmakers who have tried to tell Anna’s story on the screen is not, generally, of that kind. A novel of the length (over 900 pages) and complexity of “Anna Karenina” and a feature film of, say, two hours’ duration do not make an ideal match; dissatisfaction is inevitable, outright betrayal highly likely.

To paraphrase the novel’s famous opening sentence, every movie adaptation of “Anna Karenina” is unfaithful in its own way.

Joe Wright, the latest brave director to make the attempt, assessed the previous film versions bluntly in a recent telephone conversation: “This is so often thought of as a great romantic love story, in which Anna is martyred, the victim of a patriarchal society, which for me completely misses the point. I find that quite shocking, really, and cynical, as well.” And he got blunter: “People have turned this book into something absolutely not what Tolstoy meant, and they’ve done it for capital gain, you know?”

In his own, boldly theatrical “Anna Karenina” (opening Nov. 16), he said, “I wanted to tell the story that Tolstoy was telling.” That’s more easily said than done, and Mr. Wright, probably wisely, refrained from specifying what in his view that story is; adapting any novel as dense as “Anna Karenina” is largely a matter of settling on the right emotional tone. But the determination of Mr. Wright and the screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, not to treat the tragic liaison of Anna (Keira Knightley) and her lover, Count Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), as grand romance is a step in the right direction at least.

For filmmakers the problem with the book (aside from its length) is in fact that it lends itself rather too readily to the romantic fallacy. “Anna Karenina” can, with minimal effort, be made to fit the template of a particular, once foolproof, movie genre, the “women’s picture.” In that sort of melodrama, the emphasis throughout falls on the suffering of the heroine — at the hands of men or ungrateful children or society at large, but always, ultimately, of fate. It’s as if there were a cosmic conspiracy against her happiness: If a woman dares to love too deeply, as Anna does Vronsky, the gods will strike her down.

This is the approach of the best-known movie adaptation, the 1935 version directed by Clarence Brown, with Greta Garbo, at the peak of her stardom, in the title role. Although Brown’s direction is elegant, and Fredric March makes a fine, ardent Vronsky, the film plays as a high-class tear-jerker — which is clearly just what the studio, MGM, had in mind. The production values for which the studio was famous, are, as usual, ostentatious and wildly inappropriate. Garbo’s wardrobe is especially distracting. The gowns are frilly and fussy, and the hats are alarming; when Anna watches Vronsky riding in a horse race, she looks like a Southern belle on Kentucky Derby day. (In this version you might think that the name of Vronsky’s horse, Frou-Frou, is a homage to his mistress’s sense of personal style.)

Garbo had by the mid-’30s so thoroughly mastered the art of looking world-weary that her performance here feels oddly disengaged: one more variation on her “I vant to be alone” persona from “Grand Hotel” (1932). And if there’s one thing Anna Karenina does not want — ever, in any accent — it is to be alone. Perhaps Garbo’s apparent boredom is the consequence of her having played the part once before, and much more vigorously, in a 1927 silent called “Love,” directed by Edmund Goulding. She was all of 22 at the time — much too young for Anna, who has an 8-year-old son — but she had even then a natural gravity that allowed her to pass for an older woman, and her actual youth gives her the passion the role demands; the casting of her real-life lover, John Gilbert, as Vronsky, may have helped on that score too.

“Love” itself is fairly risible: it bears, like a scarlet letter, the shame of being the sole screen “Anna Karenina” with a happy ending. (An ending truer to the novel was shown in Europe, but the rosy-hued American release version is, sadly, the only one currently available on DVD.) It also, and almost as damagingly, reduces the narrative to the triangle of Vronsky, Anna and her husband, Alexei Karenin, eliminating entirely the major character Konstantin Levin, a philosophical rural landowner whose story — also, fundamentally, about love — takes up nearly half the novel. Without the Levin story,” Mr. Wright said, “Anna’s story doesn’t make sense at all — or just an incredibly bleak kind of sense at best.”

The new “Anna Karenina” doesn’t forget about Levin (Domnhall Gleeson), or treat him as an inconvenient, slightly puzzling minor character, and although that’s welcome it’s not really an innovation. The intelligent 1967 Russian version, directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi, pays a good deal of attention to Levin, and actually does him more justice than it does Vronsky (who is, in this Soviet interpretation, portrayed as a weak-willed aristocrat). More Levin is no guarantee of success, though. Bernard Rose’s pallid 1997 adaptation — titled, with some hubris, “Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina” — is so Levin-intensive that it has the country gentleman narrate the whole film in voice-over. It was a decision perhaps made in the editing, when the filmmakers realized that their Anna, a pouty Sophie Marceau, was fatally uninteresting.

Mr. Wright and Mr. Stoppard understand full well the importance of Levin, and understand too that the portrayal of the cuckold Karenin requires a good bit of nuance. Their Karenin, Jude Law, appears to have spent some time studying Ralph Richardson’s superb interpretation of the role — pious, pompous, insecure, and weirdly touching — in Julian Duvivier’s 1948 “Anna Karenina.” (With Vivien Leigh as a volatile Anna, and ravishing cinematography by Henri Alekan, that film is, on balance, the strongest of the earlier versions, good enough to survive even the doltish Vronsky of Kieron Moore.) But Mr. Wright — “very late on,” he said — felt he needed something more and, in the spirit of his heroine, took a leap into the void.

“For some time now,” he said, “I’ve been feeling that the tradition of realism is too obsessed with the surface of things, and what I find so engaging in Tolstoy’s novels are the twists and turns in the landscape of the characters’ minds. I wanted to find a form of expression that was more capable of conveying that sort of experience.” So instead of making a naturalistic film like his adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice” (2005) and “Atonement” (2007), he chose to stylize the action, staging the St. Petersburg and Moscow scenes in an ornate, slightly dilapidated theater, as if his characters were performing a play. Only the sequences of Levin’s country life are shot realistically, for contrast. “When I was doing research on Russian theater,” he said, “I became fascinated with Meyerhold” — Vsevolod Meyerhold , an avant-garde stage director of the early 20th century, executed by Stalin in 1940 — “and something he said really struck me: that stylization is really about subtraction rather than decoration, that the idea is to take away the surface to try to reach the essence.”

Mr. Wright’s nonnaturalistic staging is, on the face of it, a stunningly counterintuitive approach to Tolstoy’s novel, which is one of the monuments of 19th-century realistic fiction. Viewers will judge for themselves whether the stylization enhances or detracts from the power of the story, but there’s no doubt that the absence of certain kinds of “decoration” has the effect of speeding up the narrative and, in a way, enabling more of the novel’s characters and scenes to be represented on the screen. (And with Tolstoy, more is always more.) “What we did,” Mr. Wright said, “allowed, I think, for a more economical rhythm to the piece.” He elaborated: “You don’t have to do the carriage-pulls-up-outside-the-palace sort of shot, and the fact is that some very expensive shots like that don’t always have much to do with expressing the essence of character.”

When a work of literature is as familiar, as indisputably great and as frequently filmed as “Anna Karenina,” the experience of watching yet another interpretation inevitably becomes to some extent an exercise in connoisseurship, of a kind that comes naturally to audiences for ballet, opera, classical music and Shakespeare. It can feel a little funny in a movie theater, though, where our finer discriminations are usually reserved for assessments of, say, the relative merits of Daniel Craig and Sean Connery as James Bond. (Mr. Connery, by the way, was a first-rate Vronsky opposite Claire Bloom in an otherwise unmemorable 1961 BBC adaptation.) Still, if you love the novel, you want a movie of it to be true to your memories, so you can’t help making comparisons among all the various Annas and Vronskys and Karenins and Levins, and measuring everything against the “Anna Karenina” you’ve lived with all these years, seen again and again in the theater of the imagination.

The audience’s relationship to a novel like “Anna Karenina” resembles a long marriage. The relationship between any movie adaptation and its literary source is more like a passionate fling, a ships-passing-in-the-night moment when the patient prose of fiction meets the flickering, fluid poetry of film, and they see something in one another and decide, against all reason, to give it a go. As faithful as Mr. Wright has tried to be in his fervent new “Anna Karenina,” in this sort of affair fidelity is a fragile, finite thing. The sad tale of Anna and Vronsky is, he said, “more a great lust story than a great love story.” And, although he didn’t say it, that’s all any film version of “Anna Karenina” can be. Each in its own way, of course.

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• DVD & Streaming

Anna Karenina

• Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

• November 16, 2012
• Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina; Jude Law as Alexei Karenin; Oskar McNamara as Serhoza Karenin; Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Count Vronsky; Matthew Macfadyen as Stepan 'Stiva' Oblonsky; Kelly Macdonald as Dolly Oblonsky; Domhnall Gleeson as Konstantin Levin; Alicia Vikander as Kitty; Olivia Williams as Countess Vronskaya; Emily Watson as Countess Lydia; Ruth Wilson as Princess Betsy; David Wilmot as Nikolai

Home Release Date

• February 19, 2013

Distributor

• Focus Features

Movie Review

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy penned those somber words, the first sentence of his novel Anna Karenina , in 1873. Nearly a century and a half later, Tolstoy’s stern morality tale about the destructive nature of adultery has migrated (again) to the big screen. And it (again) unpacks the profound unhappiness that unfolds in the wake of its title character’s determination to embrace forbidden love at any cost.

It all begins when Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Her purpose? To convince her sister-in-law, Dolly, not to divorce her brother, a man named Oblonsky. He’s not been faithful to her, but Anna pleads with Dolly, “Is there enough love left in your heart to forgive him?”

Ironically, Anna’s attempt to rescue one marriage proves the undoing of her own. In Moscow, she meets a man who’s wooing another young friend of Anna’s named Kitty. But when Anna’s eyes meet those of the fiery young Count Vronsky, all other considerations vanish. And her halfhearted attempts to resist him quickly collapse.

The first collateral damage of the affair is Kitty, who had rejected another worthy suitor named Levin because she’d hoped Vronksy was on the verge of proposal. Levin, an earnest, hardworking farmer, retreats to his fields to lick his wounds and vows never to marry … as does Kitty after Vronsky and Anna become the gossipy talk of aristocratic Russian society.

Anna’s marriage to her husband, Karenin, is the next casualty. Despite gossip and clear signs that his wife has gone astray, the stalwart Russian refuses to believe that Anna could be cheating on him—until she confesses it directly. He refuses, then, to grant her a divorce, the one key that could potentially free her to live with her lover.

The final casualty, of course, is Anna herself.

Positive Elements

Anna’s life, her choices and their consequences offer a textbook cautionary tale. And while we’re invited to sympathize with her—she’s a passionate woman who feels trapped in a passionless marriage—the story ultimately doesn’t side with her.

Anna’s affair with Vronsky, first emotionally and then sexually, is painted in unequivocal terms. After they’ve consummated their relationship, Anna says simply, “I’m damned.” She says so because she still, if only in her heart, clings to a view of marriage as a covenant established by God, and she knows she has chosen something sinful. In this, the film represents adultery not as something that fulfills its participants, but as something that destroys their souls.

For his part, Karenin tries to do his best as a cuckolded husband. Duty, not passion, drives him. At first he chooses to believe the best of his wife, that she couldn’t possibly be making the choices he suspects she’s making. When it’s clear that she is, however, he urges her (commands her) to not see her lover again.

He is angry with her. And he says he hates her. But those emotions are eventually replaced with forgiveness. Karenin believes deeply in the sanctity of marriage, and that conviction keeps him from granting his wife a divorce. Some will see that doggedness as him cruelly holding Anna hostage. But Karenin argues, among other things, that by granting Anna a divorce, her illegitimate daughter (by Vronsky) would lose the protection that Karenin’s good name affords her. And, indeed, Karenin is portrayed as a responsible father, showing care for his own son, Serhoza, as well as Anna’s daughter, who is not his.

Speaking of Serhoza, perhaps Anna’s most endearing quality is her deep love for him, demonstrated by both actions and attitude.

Dolly does ultimately find the strength to forgive her husband. And when he refuses to halt his philandering ways, she willfully shifts her emotional energies to her children. To its further credit, the film never suggests that this is a good or healthy situation, choosing again to concentrate on the damage done by dirty deeds. One scene shows Oblonksy standing alone and staring blankly as Dolly plays with the children in the background; it’s clear he’s not been fulfilled or made happy by his adulterous choices.

In contrast to those woe-filled tales, we also have the story of Levin and Kitty. Due to her infatuation with Vronsky, Kitty initially rejects Levin’s offer of marriage. Eventually, though, they do get married. It’s clear that Levin has a high view of both love and marriage, and that he hopes and plans to tenderly care for his wife (and the child they have together). Their story offers an idealistic vision of what marriage and love can and should look like.

Spiritual Elements

The influences of the church and of Christianity are evident in the way nearly everyone responds to Anna’s affair with Vronsky. Karenin represents the common view when he describes marriage as being “bound together by God.” He also says of Oblonsky’s indiscretions, “Sin has a price.” Accordingly, breaking the marriage vow is, he says, “a crime against God.” To get remarried after divorce is unthinkable. When Anna asks for a divorce, Karenin tells her, “It would be a sin to help you destroy yourself.”

When it looks as though Anna is on death’s door during an illness, she calls for Karenin and asks for his forgiveness. He grants it. And he also says he forgives Vronsky. The result of that for him? “My soul is filled with joy,” he says. We see him reading the Bible.

A countess invites Anna to hear a message from Christian missionaries. Anna blurts out a prayer of desperation at one point: “Forgive me.” She carries a locket that has a picture of her son on one side and iconic images of Mary and Jesus on the other. A man talks sincerely about the “the grace of God.”

Levin, for his part, says, “I believe in reason,” referring to sin in ethical terms instead of spiritual ones. About adultery he says, “An impure love is not love.” He goes on to say that “sensual desire for its own sake” is no different than greed or gluttony.

Sexual Content

Anna and Vronsky’s attraction smolders for half the movie—the fire fanned by a very sensual dance together at a ball—before Anna’s will gives way and they consummate their affair. Close-up camera shots then show Vronsky’s bare torso, Anna’s shoulders and the pair’s ecstatic faces amid explicit sexual movements. Several other similarly passionate scenes likewise depict sexual movements without explicit nudity. One embrace-filled sequence involves Anna kissing Vronsky and licking his lips and moustache. The morning after a tryst, the camera shows him lying naked on his side next to Anna, who’s under the covers. (His leg, thigh, backside and torso are seen.) Anna’s bare back gets screen time in another encounter.

It’s hinted that Vronsky is a serial womanizer who frequently beds young women who hope to become his wife. And Oblonsky admits to having cheated on Dolly repeatedly, saying he simply can’t control himself. Levin’s brother, Nikolai, treats a woman who was once a prostitute as if she’s his wife (including living together).

Anna is shown in a corset. Women’s dresses reveal cleavage. A woman at an opera calls Anna a “slut.”

Violent Content

When a train unexpectedly lurches forward, a soot-covered worker falls beneath it and gets cut in half. We see his graphically dissected body and bloody entrails.

[ Spoiler Warning ] That serves as foreshadowing for Anna’s death. She commits suicide by throwing herself off a train platform, after which she, too, gets run over. We see her blood-spattered face, with a series of red droplets being made to look like tears.

In a horse race, Vronsky’s steed stumbles and falls. Its back is broken, and Vronksy is forced to shoot it. We see him aim the gun and hear the shot.

Crude or Profane Language

Two uses of “d‑‑n.” Three misuses of God’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Alcohol (generally vodka) is consumed by most of the adults in the film at various social gatherings. Vronsky and a group of fellow soldiers get rambunctious and appear to be drunk at a party. A number of characters (including Vronsky and Anna) smoke cigarettes. Anna eventually develops a dependency on morphine, which she begins to use as a tranquilizer.

Other Negative Elements

By the end, Dolly is one of the few people still willing to associate with Anna or have anything to do with her—which is to her credit. Less admirable is her admission that she esteems Anna’s selfish choices. Anna asks Dolly, “Don’t you disapprove of me for what I’ve done?” Dolly responds, “No. I would have done the same. But no one’s asked me.” Then she says she’s not sure she would have been as “brave” as Anna.

Russian literature from the 19th century has a reputation for being dense and complex. But at its core, Anna Karenina is a straightforward, simple story: A passionate, sensual woman abandons her marriage to a staid, stable man in exchange for a torrid, years-long affair with a younger interloper.

Still, Tolstoy had more in mind here than simply dishing the details of an aristocrat’s adulterous relationship with an opportunistic playboy. Instead, he uses Anna’s temptation—and her eventual headlong plunge into sin—as a narrative foil to unpack cultural expectations about love and sex, marriage and faithfulness.

In some ways, Anna is a sympathetic character, and we’re meant to have empathy for her. Her husband is as reserved and stoic as she is passionate, and it’s not hard to see how their union would have been a hard one. “Each successive generation views Anna from the context of their time,” says director Joe Wright. “She has been held up as a martyr and a heroine, especially in the 1970s and ’80s. For us, she’s human, she’s flawed, and she’s self-will run riot. She is complicated, and that is vital. Tolstoy applauds the breaking of the social rules. But I think he sees a spiritual purpose to marriage, and Anna breaks that bond.”

Indeed, Tolstoy never justifies his antiheroine’s self-absorbed, self-destructive choices. And Wright (The Soloist, Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) unflinchingly depicts the horrible price Anna must pay for clinging to her relationship with Vronsky.

Note that the unflinching part of those depictions involves sexual scenes and brief but grim violence. But unlike contemporary romances that might use a fate like Anna’s to justify divorce ( Salmon Fishing in the Yemen offers but one of many recent examples), Anna Karenina rightfully suggests that giving in to the impulse to embrace forbidden love will ultimately yield nothing but devastation.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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Anna karenina, common sense media reviewers.

Stylized retelling of Tolstoy classic best for older teens.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

While the movie makes it clear that love comes in

Anna Karenina is a good mother, if not necessarily

A man is shown pinned under a train and his bloody

Gauzy scenes in close-up and soft focus imply stro

A few uses of "damn" and "my God.&q

Some period-accurate smoking, as well as a few sce

Parents need to know that Anna Karenina is a sensuous, visually sumptuous, beautifully stylized take on Tolstoy's classic novel about doomed love in late 1870s Russia. It's quite intense, focusing on how a woman (played by Keira Knightley) turns her back on her husband to be with her lover, putting…

Positive Messages

While the movie makes it clear that love comes in many forms and, for the most part, is life-affirming and soul-sustaining, the story is also about a woman who turns her back on her husband to be with her lover, putting her marriage, motherhood, and place in society in jeopardy and tearing her apart.

Positive Role Models

Anna Karenina is a good mother, if not necessarily a good wife. Characters are complex and flawed.

Violence & Scariness

A man is shown pinned under a train and his bloody insides are visible for a few seconds; later, a woman is shown bloodied and dead after being hit by a train.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Gauzy scenes in close-up and soft focus imply strongly that a couple is having sex. Some moaning. Passionate kissing. A man is shown retrieving a birth control device before having sex. Talk of brothels, affairs/cheating, lovers. Some cleavage and scenes of shirtless men (plus one glimpse of the side of a man's bare bottom). Part of a wet nurse's breast is seen.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

A few uses of "damn" and "my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Some period-accurate smoking, as well as a few scenes of people drinking vodka and champagne. A woman resorts to using morphine to fall asleep.

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Anna Karenina is a sensuous, visually sumptuous, beautifully stylized take on Tolstoy's classic novel about doomed love in late 1870s Russia. It's quite intense, focusing on how a woman (played by Keira Knightley ) turns her back on her husband to be with her lover, putting her marriage, motherhood, and place in society in jeopardy and tearing her apart. There's little nudity beyond cleavage and men's bare chests, but some scenes definitely imply lovemaking, and there's moaning and passionate kissing. Also expect smoking and vodka drinking, as well as some tragic scenes and death. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Brilliant movie

R-rated movies for children no way., what's the story.

ANNA KARENINA takes us back to the late 1800s, when the members of Russian high society conducted their lives as if onstage, with one another as their audience. No wonder, then, that when Anna ( Keira Knightley ), the wife of studious politician Karenin ( Jude Law ), goes off-script by falling in love with a young soldier, Vronsky ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), the play, if you will, grinds to a halt. Society shuns Anna as she falls deeply in love with Vronsky, who risks his own professional advancement to stay close to her. Anna, on the other hand, has more on the line; she could lose her son and social standing forever. Is Anna's and Vronsky's love worth the sacrifice, and can it withstand all this scrutiny?

Is It Any Good?

During the end credits, director Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is said to be "inspired by" the classic Leo Tolstoy novel of the same name; "inspired" is a fitting word to use. This isn't your usual costume drama with realistic backdrops and true-to-historical-detail scenery. Instead, while it is set during the late 1870s, it unfolds mostly in a theater, with the main events taking place onstage, under a proscenium arch. The unspoken, the underbelly, the illicit takes place above it, on the crossover and flyspace. The audience in the movie is Russian society, observing the drama as it happens.

It's all brilliant, even if it takes a while to get your bearings. Traditionalists may flinch at this interpretation, which distils Tolstoy's dense novel to its essence, focusing on Anna and Levin's quest for love -- two sides of the same coin. Knightley exhibits a whole host of transformations on her face; though she relies a bit too much on some obvious reactions to transmit emotions, she's an empathetic Anna, willing us to understand why she has done all she has done, in the name of love. Taylor-Johnson is a sensual Vronsky; Anna's attraction to him is understandable, if a folly. And Law is magnificent in the economy and power of his portrayal of the cuckolded Karenin. Bottom line? This adaptation, written by playwright Tom Stoppard, is brave and sometimes claustrophobic but for the most part a success, even if you do wonder about the possibilities that could have been explored had Wright taken a more conventional route.

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Families can talk about Anna Karenina 's message. What are audiences intended to take away? Are you meant to admire the characters?

Why is Anna shunned? Why isn't she able to divorce her husband? What does her situation say about the role of women at the time?

How is this period drama different from most period dramas? Is it a format that works?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 16, 2012
• On DVD or streaming : February 19, 2013
• Cast : Aaron Taylor-Johnson , Jude Law , Keira Knightley
• Director : Joe Wright
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters
• Run time : 130 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some sexuality and violence
• Last updated : December 1, 2022

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Movie Reviews

'anna karenina,' rushing headlong toward her train.

Ella Taylor

Karenin (Jude Law) tries to rein in his wife, Anna (Keira Knightley), as she pursues a flirtation and then an affair with a handsome young military officer in a new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's iconic love story. Laurie Sparham/Focus Features hide caption

Anna Karenina

• Director: Joe Wright
• Genre: Drama
• Running time: 130 minutes

Rated R for some sexuality and violence

With: Keira Knightly, Matthew Macfayden, Jude Law

Watch Clips

'That's Enough'

Credit: Focus Features

'Leave Him'

'You Behaved Improperly'

'An Impure Love'

After he'd finished reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, did director Joe Wright scribble on the last page, "Needs more pep?"

Wright is, after all, the man who put the cute little ampersand in Pride & Prejudice and gave us a giggly Lizzie Bennet rendered by Keira Knightley. Knightley is back again in the title role as the Russian chick who loves and loses and throws herself under a train.

Casting the British actress, whose last memorable performance was in Bend It Like Beckham and who appears topless on the cover of the current Allure magazine, may have brought roses to the cheeks of the folks in marketing. But it creates a crippling problem with regard to gravitas, of which more anon.

Meantime, welcome to Joe Wright's Anna Karenina: The Musical . No one actually sings, but from the proscenium-arch opening on the adulterer Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen) scurrying down a well-upholstered hallway in search of fun, to its final shots of noble peasants rhythmically scything, the movie sets out to deliver Broadway dazzle.

There are dances, there are races, there are freeze-frame tableaux vivants in the manner of My Fair Lady . There is heaving between the sheets, followed by wringing of hands and rueing of the day.

And for a while at least, why not have a ball? Tolstoy gave good ballroom, too, and for all his reputation as the ultimate realist writer, he deployed an array of literary strategies in Anna Karenina — including a section written from the point of view of a dog. But his prose wasn't forever blaring, "Look, Ma, no hands!"

And given that Anna's adventures in extramarital romance famously end in tears, there are (or should be) limits to how long you can sustain the jaunty tone; Wright keeps at it, alas, until it's too late for tragedy, even considering the endlessly foreshadowing grind of giant train wheels presumably meant to remind us that this is not a caper.

The best that can be said of Knightley is that she's puppy-eyed eye candy, in vibrant reds and blacks with fur trims to die for. But that's window dressing, and under her glossy surface, Anna Karenina is a woman of many passionately conflicting parts — reluctant temptress, ardent lover, loving mother, an urban sophisticate who's also deeply insecure and hungry for approval. She's a modern woman way before her time.

Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a cavalry officer who ignores 19th century Russian social norms to pursue a married woman. Laurie Sparham/Focus Features hide caption

Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a cavalry officer who ignores 19th century Russian social norms to pursue a married woman.

All of which Knightley mangles into her customary rotation of pouty-lipped sex kitten, hysteric, and tragic victim of society, each pose separated by little gasps of surprise. Inner life comes hard to Knightley, and she never gets a grip on the mounting emotional turmoil that threatens to crush Anna as she progresses from stylish young hipster-about-town to kept woman to bereft mother to paranoid social pariah.

It doesn't help that her paramour, Count Vronsky, is played by a vapid Aaron Taylor-Johnson in bottle-blond hair and sparkly teeth. Or that Knightley is flanked by three actresses — Kelly MacDonald as her frumpy but admiring sister-in-law (allegedly modeled on Tolstoy's long-suffering wife), Olivia Williams as Vronsky's mother, and Emily Watson as a prim paragon — any of whom who would have done full justice to Anna's long slide into despair.

Still, there are things here to treasure, among them the inspired bit of casting mischief that has bad boy Jude Law as Anna's husband, Karenin, a stuffy, old-school bureaucrat untenably stuck between forgiveness and revenge for his wife's betrayal. No winking at the audience here: Law commits fully to the role and to Tom Stoppard's often brilliantly pithy screenplay.

It's Law's earnest Karenin who articulates the novel's deeper moral dilemmas, to the tortured nature that traps Anna (and Tolstoy) between the old, rigidly rule-bound world and an emerging new one that's bringing divorce, uppity women and moral uncertainty with it. "I'd call on her if she'd only broken the law, but she broke the rules," whispers one imperial matron after giving a desperate Anna the cold shoulder.

Small wonder that the most successful love story in this Karenina is between the landowner Levin (Domnhall Gleeson) and Kitty (Alicia Vikander), a flighty young thing who, having gotten over her own crush on Vronsky, steps up to become a sterling country wife. Re-enter peasants, rhythmically scything.

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Movie Review: Anna Karenina (2012)

• Charlie Juhl
• Movie Reviews
• No responses
• --> December 15, 2012

The beautiful Anna.

Joe Wright should win the award for most courageous director of the year. The majority of Anna Karenina is filmed in a theater with all of the sets built on and around a main stage including a skating rink, a grassy field, a snowy train station, and even a horse race. It is not claustrophobic, but it can get a bit dizzy. The camera frequently spins around in a circle to clear off the previous set and introduce a new locale.

Considering that the source material is a very long and deep work of 19th century Russian literature, the film’s pace is throttled full speed ahead. It is not quite frenetic, but it is noticeably fast in order to condense a considerable amount of story into a little over two hours. Baz Luhrmann’s “ Moulin Rouge! ” immediately jumps to mind. It does not sprint as fast as “Moulin Rouge!” did in its first half hour, but it is not lapped by it either. Also, the atmosphere (in the first half of the film) is deliberately light and comic. The choreographed movement approaches farce at times which is most unexpected considering the main themes of Anna Karenina are adultery, hypocrisy, lust, and love.

Anna (Keira Knightley) and her senior statesman husband Aleksei Karenin (Jude Law) live extremely comfortable lives in the upper crust of St. Petersburg society. In overt foreshadowing of events to come, Anna takes off for Moscow to repair her brother, Count Oblonsky’s, (Matthew Macfadyen) marriage to Dolly (Kelly Macdonald) due to his frequent infidelities. She urges Dolly to forgive and forget; why rock the boat? If she does not forgive Oblonsky, then there will surely be a divorce, scandal, the loss of position, and what could truly be worse than that? Well, Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is about to show Anna just how low she is willing to travel all in the name of true, romantic love.

Karenin is 20 years Anna’s senior but he has an impeccable character, deep honor, is a good father and husband, and is regarded as saintly by his peers. He is about to become the patron saint of cuckolds quite soon. Vronsky embodies most of the characteristics which Karenin lacks. He is a womanizer, has loose morals, and emerges as a fop, a dandy, a mere boy compared to Anna. He is a gnat buzzing around her perfectly coiffed hair yet for reasons neither we nor Anna understands, she cannot take her eyes off of him. Vronsky is expected to propose to Dolly’s younger sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander) but all of those emotions vaporize in an instant when Vronsky lays eyes on Anna.

It is the chemistry and emotion between Anna and Vronsky where Anna Karenina falls flat and makes you yearn for the much more powerful love triangle of “Moulin Rouge!.” The audience feels the passion between Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, the penniless writer and the courtesan who are repeatedly torn apart by the evil duke. Never once will the audience here understand the decisions Anna makes regarding Vronsky. He is a blatant cad and nuisance threatening the very essence of Anna’s social status and ultimately health as he successfully tears her away from her husband who views the whole affair a slight against the almighty himself.

Scandalous!

Joe Wright also chose to cast British and Scottish actors and have them use their native accents. None of the leads are Russian and there are no Russian accents. I wonder if native Russians will feel that one of their sacred texts has been transformed into British soap opera. The light and festive atmosphere in the first half of the film works quite well. The pace keeps the audience interested and on their toes to try and keep up with the incessant scene changes and time jumps. The second half naturally slows down as the drama and tension mount and then the final half hour takes a direct nose dive off a cliff. Anna discovers the hypocrisy of Russian society which excludes her yet she does not function very well outside of it. She becomes paranoid and loses all of the grace and charisma her character displayed early on which garnered our sympathy for her. Yes, the film dutifully follows the novel’s story line, but that does not automatically maker Anna’s character arc a joy to sit through.

The most important part of all of the pieces which must come together to successfully transform one of the most popular and beloved novels of all time to the big screen is the screenplay and the choices the writer makes. Tom Stoppard obviously could not include everything, but he surely gave it his best effort. He almost forces Joe Wright’s hand to move the film along so fast because he chose to keep so much of the original story into this one. Yes, Anna Karenina is one of the most courageous films of the year if not the bravest over all, but it is not one of the best.

Tagged: affair , novel adaptation , Russia

I like movies and they like me right back. You can find out how much by visiting my personal site Citizen Charlie .

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Anna Karenina Reviews

Anna Karenina could have been more tragic and stirring had the director not shown us his lovelorn heroine in conventional shopworn situations.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2023

With such a brief running time, it's difficult to create a convincing union - both during the moments of bliss and quarreling, which are equally rushed.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jul 24, 2020

Fine, fine, and super-fine, if the least bit archaic.

Full Review | May 4, 2020

If you still doubt either Hollywood's ability to deal with a masterpiece or Greta Garbo's greatness as an artist, this is the picture to see.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2019

There seems more of anguish and more of sombre depth in this version than there was in the old silent film (with Garbo and John Gilbert). Garbo acts with a dignity and a bitter passion.

Full Review | Jun 12, 2019

It is Greta Garbo's personality which "makes" this film, which fills the mould of the neat respectful adaptation with some sense of the greatness in the novel.

Full Review | Jun 13, 2018

On the whole, Anna Karenina is a picture of merit. It is decorative, well-meaning, and full of neat encounters, and it certainly presents a Garbo in the high summer of her maturity, richer and more mellow than she has ever been before.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2015

This lavish, MGM production surely excises some of the important details from Leo Tolstoy's novel, but makes up for it with the luminous presence of Greta Garbo and some gorgeous cinematography.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2011

Garbo, who also starred in the 1927 silent version of the Tolstoy story, is radiant and vulnerable throughout the film, the centre of the emotional storm that engulfs her.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2008

In her 23rd film, Garbo's luminous performance, as the audlterous protag of Tolstoy's novel, is way above the mediocre level of the narrative and direction; the film is a remake of Love, in which Garbo starred opposite her then lover John Gilbert.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Sep 22, 2007

Given the full glossy MGM treatment.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Mar 8, 2005

Garbo speaks again in one of her best.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 1, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2004

One of Garbo's best and most affecting films.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2003

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Anna Karenina (2012)

September 11, 2012 by admin

Anna Karenina , 2012.

Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Keira Knightley, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kelly Macdonald, Jude Law, Matthew Macfadyen, Michelle Dockery, Olivia Williams, Emily Watson, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson.

In 19th century Russia, Anna Karenina begins a life-changing affair with the affluent Count Vronsky.

Anna Karenina is an adaptation of the classic novel by Leo Tolstoy (of War and Peace fame). Originally written in serial format from 1873 to 1877, it has been adapted into a screenplay by Tom Stoppard ( Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead , Shakespeare in Love ) and directed by Joe Wright ( Pride and Prejudice , Atonement ). It also reunites Wright, for the third time, with actress Keira Knightley ( Pirates of the Caribbean ) cast in the lead role as Anna.

Set amongst Russian high society in 1874, the film explores the theme of love: between a husband and wife, parents and children, siblings and between lovers. The focus is on Anna Karenina, the wife of Alexei, a pious, cold, yet kind politician (played by a glum, balding Jude Law from Cold Mountain ) as she engages in a scandalous affair with a dashing cavalry officer, Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson; Kick-Ass ), which leads to her eventual and inevitable downfall.

At first glance, it’s a typical period drama along the lines of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre with its focus on social elites, lavish costumes, glamorous balls and landscapes, and whatever society dictates is proper behaviour.

What separates it from being a typical drama is its engaging style of presentation. Rather than recreating 19th century Moscow and St Petersburg, the film is set within a dilapidated theatre. Backdrops are lowered and raised as characters walk in, gangways are used as Moscow’s streets, and stage hands serve as peasants. Ropes, sandbags and lights are clearly on display, with no attempt to try and disguise the fact that events are taking place within a theatre. It provides several benefits to Wright: it adds a theatricality and eccentricity to proceedings and creates energy in the film as sets and locations revolve around the actors, while providing pace and fluidity to scene progression.

A gimmick? Perhaps. A cost-cutting measure? According to Knightley. Pointless? Not at all. It heightens the film as a whole, making it more engaging and original. It is at times distracting, but it serves a very important function.

The fake, staged, theatrical presentation reminds the audience that what is happening is fake, and that is the entire point of Stoppard’s screenplay. Stoppard’s version of Anna Karenina is a good companion piece to Parade’s End , the BBC drama also written for the screen by Stoppard (see Liam Trim’s reviews so far here ). Both are about love, propriety, and how society and propriety stifle and suffocate love.

In the film, things that are real and true and honourable (as decided by Wright and Stoppard), happen in the real world: Anna and Vronsy meet outside, have a picnic and make love in a forest, and when landowner Konstantin Levin (played with expert vulnerability and pathos by Dormhnall Gleeson; Six Shooter , Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ) returns to work on his farm, this takes place in an actual field.

In contrast, the balls and parties of Russian society, as well as the offices and workplaces, are staged, fake, constructed and take place in the manufactured fakery of the theatre. This extends to the performances and actions of the casts: everyone moves in a practised and precise way, dancing through social situations and life in a choreographed and, above all, fake way.

The message is clear; this society is fake, so the values and beliefs it has are as silly and fake as the theatre in which they reside, but it is this fake society that leads to Anna’s downfall. Her affair only concerns her, her husband and her family, but it is the members of Russian society who punish her: their intense, jealous stares accuse Anna, and make her an outcast. In one telling line of dialogue, a princess explains why she is keeping her distance from Anna: “It would be fine if she’d only broken the law, but she broke the rules.”

Who made these rules? Who decided that Anna’s search for love and happiness were wrong? Only this society which is manufactured, fake and has no business in the affairs of real people.

This powerful and compelling message is well communicated by the film, but it is let down in a few areas, holding it back from being a masterpiece.

For one thing, the theatre gimmick is, as mentioned, distracting, and after the first act fails to maintain the same energy. The script also has a bit of flab, with characters going in circles over the same points in the second act: ten to fifteen minutes of the film could easily be shaved off. But the main problem is some of the performances.

Jude Law performs well, but has a difficult job communicating Alexei’s love and sadness despite his reserved manner. Taylor-Johnson puts in a great performance: he looks and acts like a classic movie star as Vronsky woos the ladies, and Wright gets in as many opportunities as he can to show off the lad’s physique.

As mentioned, Gleeson is brilliant as Levin, a young landowner in love with Kitty (Alicia Vikander, The Seventh Son ). Their evolving and slow romance is a highlight of the film, as it feels very real and pulls at the heartstrings.

But the whole thing hangs on the lead actress. Despite it being very much a director’s movie, one in which Wright expresses great control and craftsmanship over every element, it is still called Anna Karenina and requires a strong central performance.

Keira pulls off a good job, and she’s a good actress, but not a great one. What I think she is, however, is a piece of set dressing, or a tailor’s dummy. I don’t mean this in a mean way. She looks great and she serves whatever purpose a director asks of her, but it is all surface, all presentation. Her version of Anna will be melodramatic at one moment, hysterical the next, depending on what Wright wants, but it never feels consistent or threaded together. And in those quieter, internal moments, she simply does not communicate the great turmoil and Tolstoyian tragedy within Anna.

Once again, compare Keira’s Anna to Rebecca Hall’s Sylvia in Parade’s End : both feel conflicted over their love lives and oppressed by society, but Hall has a greater range and is more engaging and mesmerizing to watch, even on the small screen. With Keira, there is a great deal on the surface, but little underneath it.

Despite this gripe, Anna Karenina is a success. Despite the length and melodrama, the style, visuals and craftsmanship on display will satisfy fans of period drama, and might even win over sceptics of the genre.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★  

Luke Graham is a writer and graduate. If you enjoyed this review, follow him @LukeWGraham and check out his blog here .

If you are a fan of period dramas, you can find all your favourites in LOVEFiLM’s database. From Pride & Prejudice to the more modern ones such as Keira Knightley’s The Duchess, you are sure to find free movies online to suit you.

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Anna Karenina Review

07 Sep 2012

129 minutes

Anna Karenina

There are numerous reasons to welcome, if not cherish, Joe Wright’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s 1873 socialite-shags-a-soldier doorstop. Despite eye-popping period finery, longing looks a-plenty and Olympic standard fan waving, Anna Karenina militantly doesn’t want to be just another costume drama; it attacks the heavyweight concerns of Russian literature (hypocrisy, jealousy, faith, fidelity, the pastoral vs. the urban, huge moustaches) with wit and verve; most exciting of all, it is filmmaking of the highest order, channeling every other art form from painting to ballet to puppetry while remaining completely cinematic.

Wright’s conceit is to dramatise the lion’s share of Tolstoy’s 864 pages inside a dilapidated 19th century theatre to suggest the falsity of Russian society, only roaming into “real” world to follow young romantic Levin (a terrific Domhnall Gleeson) in his search for a “real” life. So, via One From The Heart-esque theatre craft, the set transforms from endless desks of accountants rhythmically stamping to a full-sized train entering a bustling station to a steeplechase raging across the stage all within the confines of the theatre walls. Best of all is a lavish ball in which Taylor-Johnson’s officer sweeps Knightley’s Anna off her feet. It is an Adam Ant video directed by Visconti and it is stunning.

Yet Wright doesn’t let the theatricality spill into the naturalistic performances. Knightley and Taylor-Johnson inhabit Anna and Vronsky but as the relationship moves on the central pair’s dilemma become less involving. More touching is the young romance between Gleeson’s Levin and Alicia Vikander’s Kitty — when they spell out their feelings in lettered blocks, it is as moving love scene as we've seen this year.

Around the central couples, a clutch of familiar faces help navigate the dense dramatis personae — stand-outs include Law as Anna’s staid spouse (you’ll shudder at his little box) and a boisterous Macfadyen as Anna’s brother — but this is really its director’s movie. Bold, imaginative, thought-provoking and passionate, Anna Karenina puts Wright at the forefront of filmmaking in Britain. Or anywhere.

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These are the only Anna Karenina adaptations you actually need to know about.

The news out of Moscow/wherever Netflix is headquartered today is that the streaming giant has set a contemporary reimagining of Anna Karenina as its first-ever Russian original drama series.

For the ignorant among you, Leo Tolstoy’s epic 1878 novel — considered by many to be the greatest work of literature ever written — is the tale of a beautiful but unhappily married Muscovite who begins an affair with a dashing young calvary officer. When their dalliance is discovered, scandalizing Russian high society, Anna’s world begins to unravel and, well, locomotive tragedy ensues.

As you would expect, Anna Karenina has been adapted many, many, many times over the past century. Based on my extensive research , there have been fifteen movies, six television series, four ballets, four operas, two musicals, one lonely play, and even a steampunk mash-up novel based on the 800-page opus.

Now, we (I) don’t have the time (inclination) to run through them all, but here are five of the most, eh, heralded , so you can choo-choo-choose your own favorite:

Anna Karenina (1935) dir. Clarance Brown

The most famous and critically-acclaimed of all the Annas Karenina, Greta Garbo’s anguished performance became the yardstick against which all future screen Annas were measured. As Graham Greene wrote at the time: “it is Greta Garbo’s personality which ‘makes’ this film, which fills the mould of the neat respectful adaptation with some kind of sense of the greatness of the novel.”

This subtle, Garbo-forward trailer for the film (which clocks in at an impressively condensed 95 minutes) is well worth a watch.

Android Karenina , Ben Winters (2010)

Tolstoy’s timeless tale of passion and betrayal reimagined as a parodic steampunk mashup by the author of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters . In an alternate reality tsarist Russia, a miracle metal, gronzium, has fueled the development of a robust robo-culture, but human loins are still a-burnin’. Said Publishers Weekly of the hybrid: “The sci-fi elements are carefully accomplished, sometimes brilliantly extrapolated from the original. The Class IIIs, for example, also act as telling externalizations of their masters: cold, duty-bound Karenin becomes half-robot and childish Kitty gets a pink, mechanized ballerina companion. Tolstoy’s text is more than strong enough to stand up to this sort of treatment, its force attenuated just enough to allow Winters to integrate his additions—a feat he manages with aplomb.”

Anna Karenina (2012) dir. Joe Wright

Audiences were a little cold on Joe Wright’s lush, overwrought, Tom Stoppard-scripted 2012 adaptation. The theatrical scaffolding and Wright’s emphasis on opulent style over meaty novelistic substance rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, and I suppose they’re not wrong. I remember enjoying it, though. It looks absolutely gorgeous and Kiera Knightly and Jude Law acquit themselves admirably. According to my wife, however, Count Vronsky should have been played by sinister sex symbol Tom Hiddleson, rather than the then-somewhat-adolescent-looking Aaron Taylor-Johnson. “Hiddles exudes a much more confident sexual energy,” she explained. Can’t argue with that.

Anna Karenina , Aleks Kontr, 2017

Less an adaptation than an erotic fever dream made gloriously manifest, this eye-catching artistic interpretation of Anna’s liberated lifestyle/tragic end by the New York-based fusion painter  Aleks Kontr  (“The New York Magazine asked him in an interview: ‘Don’t you think is overdose of Attractive Erotic World in your Artworks?’ and my answer was: ‘Nudity Save the World!'”) can be yours for just $2000. If money’s tight right now, don’t fret; you can always purchase one of these stylish tote bags for mere $24.

Anna Karenina (2020) dir. My wife Starring: My dog and I

It was a long year…

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May 1, 2024.

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This underrated 2019 action movie is a big hit on Netflix now. Here’s why you need to watch it

If it seems like there’s an unexpected champion on top of the list of Netflix’s most popular movies every week, that’s because there often is. There’s always at least one film that comes out of nowhere and blows away the competition from both the major studios and Netflix itself. This week, that movie is Anna , a 2019 action thriller from writer/director Luc Besson that bombed during its initial run in theaters. But when has that ever stopped Netflix users from embracing a flick?

• It’s La Femme Nikita 2.0

Sasha Luss is an action star on the rise

Anna has a stellar supporting cast, the action is thrilling and exciting.

One of the big reasons why Anna failed to connect with audiences the first time is that Lionsgate dropped Anna in theaters with little fanfare, so it wasn’t surprising when people simply didn’t show up to see it. Now that the film is enjoying a surge of popularity, it’s time to go over the four reasons why you should watch Anna on Netflix.

It’s La Femme Nikita 2.0

Because La Femme Nikita came out in theaters in 1990 and isn’t readily available to stream, it’s largely been forgotten expect by the film lovers who saw it during the ’90s. They’re the ones who correctly pointed out that Anna is largely a rehash of the earlier movie, which was also written and directed by Besson.

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But this actually works in Anna ‘s favor. While it’s true that La Femme Nikita is a better overall movie, Anna gets a lot of mileage out of following a lot of the same story beats. Since the earlier film is no longer as prevalent as it once was, it’s easier to watch Anna Poliatova (Sasha Luss) rise from nothing to become an elite assassin for the KGB at the tail end of the Cold War. Anna does offer a few changes from La Femme Nikita , but it’s largely the same story. Besson copied from himself because it’s still a winning formula for an action thriller.

If you want someone to convincingly portray an assassin pretending to play a Russian model, it certainly helps to cast a Russian model in the role. Anna was supposed to be the breakout movie for Sasha Luss, but instead she’s only had a handful of parts in the intervening five years. Now that Anna is hit on Netflix , viewers can finally see what drew Besson to her in the first place.

Luss may not have an athlete’s physique, but she dives into the action sequences with enthusiasm. It does require some suspension of disbelief that Anna can overwhelm and kill a room full of trained bodyguards, but it’s still a lot of fun to watch her do it. However, the quality that may lift Luss to greater stardom is that she has the ability to convey Anna’s emotions and thoughts through her facial expressions and body language. That goes a long way toward getting the audience to accept her.

The presence of the reigning winner of the Best Actor Oscar has to be one of the biggest reasons for the revival of interest in Anna . Oppenheimer ‘s Cillian Murphy plays Leonard Miller, a CIA agent who crosses paths with Anna. Murphy’s not the star in this movie, but his character does have one of the key supporting roles.

Helen Mirren also co-stars as Olga, Anna’s reluctant mentor in the KGB, with Luke Evans as Alex Tchenkov, the man who recruited Anna in the first place. Between Murphy, Mirren, and Evans, Luss is surrounded by veteran performers who can make just about anything work. Their presence alone elevates Anna to another level.

Finally, the best reason to watch Anna is for the action. When the film really gets going, it’s thrilling to watch Anna take on several men at once, especially during a very public assassination inside of a restaurant. Besson’s action chorography is fantastic, and the camera always seems to have Suss clearly in focus while Anna fights for her life.

Netflix subscribers love action , and Anna is much better than the standard made-for-Netflix flicks in the same genre. Anna is not without its faults, but it delivers exactly what it’s supposed to.

Watch Anna on Netflix .

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Netflix couldn't have asked for a better late April gift than the streaming premiere of Anyone But You. Thanks to Netflix's deal with Sony, 2024's blockbuster rom-com is already on top of the list of the most popular movies on Netflix, leaving Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver in second place. But things could be much worse for Rebel Moon – Part Two, which is performing well a week after its debut.

The other new addition for the week is King Richard, a sports drama starring Will Smith that's appearing on loan from Warner Bros. Discovery. It's also one of Netflix's top movies of the week, which suggests that the film may find sustained popularity on this platform that it didn't get on Max.

The days are running out for April, and if you're a Hulu subscriber, that means some of the streamer's best movies are on their way out the door. And because many of the movies leaving Hulu in April are from outside studios, there's no guarantee that they'll be back in the future.

Since there's less than a week left in April, there's really only one solution: Make time for the movies that you want to see. To help you make you're plans, we're sharing our list of the five great movies leaving Hulu in April that you have to watch before the end of the month. Stand by Me (1986)

May 1 is less than a week away, meaning Netflix will be removing numerous movies from its library. Notable titles leaving at the end of April include Joker, Todd Phillips' Oscar-winning origin story for DC's most notorious villain; Apollo 13, Ron Howard's terrific drama about the failed moon mission; and Whiplash, Damien Chazelle's sensational thriller about a jazz drummer's pursuit of excellence.

And there are even more great movies leaving Netflix in April. Our selections include a revolutionary sci-fi action film from the 1990s, a hilarious comedy featuring a terrific duo, and a musical biopic about an icon. Carve out some time to watch these three movies by May 1. Jurassic Park (1993)

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, leo tolstoy's anna karenina.

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It's not the story but the style and the ideas that make Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina'' a great novel and not a soap opera. There's no shortage of stories about bored rich women who leave their older husbands and take up with playboys. This new screen version of the novel makes that clear by focusing on the story, which without Tolstoy's wisdom, is a grim and melodramatic affair. Here is a woman of intoxicating beauty and deep passion, and she becomes so morose and tiresome that by the end, we'd just as soon she throw herself under a train, and are not much cheered when she obliges.

The film has been shot on location in Russia; we see St. Petersburg exteriors, country estates and opulent Czarist palaces whose corridors recede to infinity. It all looks wonderful, but the characters, with one exception, are clunks who seem awed to be in the screen adaptation of a Russian classic. The exception is Alexei Karenin, Anna's husband, who is played by James Fox with such a weary bitterness that I found myself caring for him even when he was being cruel to poor Anna.

The story: Anna ( Sophie Marceau ) and her husband live on a country estate, where their marriage is a dry affair. She goes to the city to counsel her rakish brother Stiva ( Danny Huston ), who is treating his wife badly. She meets a slickster named Count Vronsky ( Sean Bean ), who has a mistress named Kitty ( Mia Kirshner ), but he drops her the moment he sees Anna. He dances with her, she is intoxicated by his boldness, she leaves by train, and he stops the train in the middle of the night to say he must have her, etc. It is not a good sign that while he declares his love, we are more concerned about how his horses could have possibly overtaken the train.

Back in the country, Vronsky pursues his ideal, and Anna succumbs, after a tiny little struggle. Karenin observes what is happening, especially during a steeplechase when Vronsky's horse falls and Anna shrieks with concern that appears unseemly in another man's wife. Soon Anna is pregnant by Vronsky. Karenin, after trying to force himself on her, offers her a deal: If she stays with him and behaves herself, she can keep the child. Otherwise, she gets Vronsky, but not the child.

As in all late 19th century novels, this crisis leads to a sickbed scene, declarations of redemption and forgiveness, etc., while meanwhile in the city, a parallel romance develops between the jilted Kitty and the kind but uncharismatic Levin ( Alfred Molina ). In the novel, Levin stands for Tolstoy, and also for the decency that the other characters lack.

The challenge of any adapter of "Anna Karenina'' is to make Anna sympathetic despite her misbehavior. Sometimes that is done with casting (how could we deny Garbo anything?), sometimes with writing. In this film, it is not done. I never felt sympathy for her, perhaps because Sophie Marceau (from "Braveheart") makes her such a narcissistic sponge, while Fox makes her husband tortured but understandable. Toward the end, as Anna and Vronsky are shunned by society and live in isolation, she even gets on his nerves, especially after she becomes addicted to laudanum.

There is much more to Tolstoy's story--but not in this bloodless and shallow adaptation. Bernard Rose is a director of talent (his " Paperhouse " was a visionary film, and his " Immortal Beloved " was a biopic that brought great passion to the story of Beethoven). Here, shooting on fabulous locations, he seems to have lost track of his characters. The movie is like a storyboard for "Anna Karenina'' with the life and subtlety still to be added.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Anna Karenina (1997)

Rated PG-13 For Mature Thematic Elements and Some Sensuality/Nudity

108 minutes

Sophie Marceau as Anna Karenina

Sean Bean as Count Vronsky

Alfred Molina as Constantin Levin

James Fox as Alexei Karenin

Written and Directed by

• Bernard Rose

Based On The Novel by

• Leo Tolstoy

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Carla Gugino to portray screen legend Vivien Leigh in biopic The Florist

Leigh famously won Best Actress Oscars for "Gone With the Wind" and "A Streetcar Named Desire."

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

Frankly, my dear, it's time for another biopic.

Spy Kids and Fall of the House of Usher actress Carla Gugino is set to portray screen legend Vivien Leigh , who famously played Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind , in a new movie titled The Florist .

According to Variety , which first reported the news, the film will take place in the 1960s and follow Leigh as she prepares to star in a Broadway production of John Gielgud's adaptation of Chekhov's Ivanov . It will depict Leigh's struggles with bipolar disorder and electroconvulsive therapy, as well as an unexpected romance with Joseph Penn, a World War II veteran and florist who first encounters Leigh while making a delivery.

EW can confirm Nick Sandow will direct from a script by Jayce Bartok, who wrote the film based on a series of letters. Representatives for Gugino didn't immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly 's request for comment.

"I couldn't be more excited about the opportunity to excavate a woman as complex, contradictory, and compelling as Vivien," Gugino told Variety . "From the moment I read the script, I knew The Florist was a journey I had to pursue."

Stephanie Augello/Variety via Getty; General Photographic Agency/Getty 

Widely considered one of the greatest actresses of the classic Hollywood era, Leigh won Best Actress Oscars for Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire (the latter of which saw her playing a Southern belle). Her other credits included Waterloo Bridge , Anna Karenina , and That Hamilton Woman .

Leigh was also known for her relationship Laurence Olivier . The two began an affair while making the 1937 film Fire Over England , while they each were still married to other people. Leigh and Olivier wed in 1940, and she had her first major mental breakdown in the mid-1940s. Her mental health issues, as well as infidelity on both sides, strained her marriage to Olivier until they divorced in 1960.

Because of her struggles with her mental health, Leigh represents a challenging subject for a biopic. Similar to screen icon Marilyn Monroe , her story is ripe for exploitation, exaggeration, and misrepresentation.

That hasn't stopped filmmakers, however. Morgan Brittany portrayed Leigh in three different screen projects from 1976 to 1980. More recently, Julia Ormond played the actress in 2011's My Week With Marilyn and Katie McGuinness portrayed a woefully inaccurate, nymphomaniac iteration of Leigh in Ryan Murphy's Hollywood .

At one time, Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer was attached to play Leigh in a television series she was also producing, based on Kendra Bean's 2013 biography  Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait . That project is no longer in development, though it did give us some ideas for who might be good fits to play the other luminaries in Leigh's life.

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Anna Karenina Full Episode 7 | Holy Week 2024

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Ruth (Valerie Concepcion) cannot bear to sympathize with the three Anna Kareninas because she believes they are after the family fortune.

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