Ana Karenjina

Director Joe Wright worked with Keira Knightley on heavyweight literary films Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, and this time the two tackle Tolstoy’s doorstop-sized novel Anna Karenina.

Movies like "Anna Karenina" are what people mean when talking about Hollywood magic. Director Joe Wright has taken the much-told tale of the late 19th-century Russia heroine and cast a cinematic spell to make his film version as compelling...

The last time director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Hanna”) teamed with Keira Knightley on an adaptation of classic literature (“Pride and Prejudice”), she scored a Best Actress Oscar nod.

As if adapting Anna Karenina wasn’t challenge enough, screenwriter Tom Stoppard and director Joe Wright have added another burden to their chore: they’ve confined the Tolstoy tale within a 17th-century theater, so that most scenes take place...

This classic story by Leo Tolstoy has been adapted to film many times, but I'll bet none of these adaptations were as clever and gorgeous-looking as this modern Joe Wright-directed (“Pride and Prejudice”) Tom Stoppard-written (“Shakespeare in Love”)...

Every so often, a filmmaker will take a radically outside-the-box approach to telling a story. Marc Webb used conceptual asides to get inside the head of a lovesick Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer.

Anna Karenina has a long screen history dating back to 1910. Greta Garbo played the role twice, in a silent movie called Love, and then most famously in the critically acclaimed 1935 version produced by David O. Selznick, directed by Clarence Brown...

It's slightly off-putting at first to see Leo Tolstoy's novel, which is well-regarded for its realism, interpreted in such a representational way. Director Joe Wright imagines the world of Imperial Russia in the 1870s as theater—both the art and...

“Anna Karenina” is based on a big Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy and directed by Joe Wright, who has made two previous costume dramas with Keira Knightley: “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement.” Yet the medium it most evokes is not literature or cinema...

The Tom Stoppard-scripted "Anna Karenina" opens with a virtuosic display of orchestrated one-take linear camera movement to transport the viewer from a backstage theatrical reality to an adaptable cinematic experience. The daring bit of imaginative...

Anna Karenina is a romantic drama set in 19th century Russia, and Wright does his best to keep the movie from feeling anything like a traditional period piece. The first act is terrific as Wright develops the plot, characters and variety of...

Like most alleged love-it-or-hate-it propositions, the new film version of "Anna Karenina" is neither. Rather, it's a half-success -- a baldly conceptual response to the Leo Tolstoy novel, with a heavy theatrical framework placed around the narrative...

Like Frankenstein and Hamlet, Anna Karenina is a literary touchstone that filmmakers return to on a regular basis. The first filmed version of the book was a 1910 German silent which has long since been lost to the ages.

In Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the eponymous heroine meets her demise with a good 50 pages to spare, leaving an entire section of the book to deal with not only the fallout of her death, but the resolution of the proto-existential crisis of the...

Knocking some stuffiness out of Leo Tolstoy's lit-class hurdle Anna Karenina, director Joe Wright atones for previously turning theaters into staid libraries. There's little of his slavish reverence for the written word that made snores of Atonement...

There’s no deadlier sort of movie than a stodgy literary adaptation. Thankfully, Joe Wright seems incapable of making one. When, at the far end of a long run of Jane Austen adaptations, another take on Pride & Prejudice seemed like the last...

An updated, streamlined version of the Tolstoy classic will appeal to a younger demographic while the oldsters will stick to reading the book.

A radical departure from the classic versions starring Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh, Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is a handsome, grandly theatrical reimagining of the Tolstoy novel starring his muse, Keira Knightley.

In Anna Karenina, director Joe Wright and writer Tom Stoppard assume that the viewer has at least a passing familiarity with Leo Tolstoy’s novel and with Russian literature.

Any two hours adaptation will not be able to properly articulate the story of Anna Karenina. Not even Joe Wright's endearing skills as a director could have lifted this story from under Tolstoy's palms.

First published in a literary magazine between 1873 and 1877 in a series of installments, Anna Karenina is a 1000+ page opus which chronicles the ill-fated affair between a St. Petersburg socialite and a strapping, young soldier.

Joe Wright's 2005 directorial debut Pride & Prejudice was more than just a stunning introduction to two formidable new talents (that would be both Wright and his star, Keira Knightley). It was a kind of call to arms for period pieces, a vivid reminder...

The first thing to say about Joe Wright's 2012 take on Leo Tolstoy's epic novel of doomed romance in Russian society is that it's unlikely to appeal to those with a taste for traditional costume drama.

Wright's new take on the oft told Tolstoy classic is vibrant and energetic, making it easily accessible to a 21st century audience. It's devoid of stuffiness and is in no way reverential towards its source material.

There are moments in Joe Wright’s exquisitely artificial remounting of Anna Karenina when Keira Knightley stares at the camera in passionate close-up and we are invited to drink her in: the lush pout, the soft sculpt of her chin, the promise of her...

Anna Karenina Wright and Stoppard take an askance approach to Leo Tolstoy's classic novel, giving the story a theatrical spin that augments the setting and brings out the characters' feistiness. The icy approach drags in the second half, but it's...

AS autumn nears the idea of a sumptuous adaptation of Anna Karenina is very appealing, an all-enveloping David Lean-esque escape into glittering and wintry Imperial Russia.

Strikingly imaginative and beautifully directed, Anna Karenina is a hugely enjoyable drama with a superb script and a terrific central performance from Keira Knightley. Unmissable.

All the world’s a stage, some bloke once wrote. And the men and women in Joe Wright’s stylised take on Leo Tolstoy’s 19th-Century tome are merely players thanks to the Hanna director’s decision to base its melodramatic action within the confines of a...

If it doesn’t ultimately engage your heart as it might, Anna Karenina is period drama at its most exciting, intoxicating and modern. Spellbinding.