Anna Karenina

4.75
    Anna Karenina
    2012

    Synopsis

    In Imperial Russia, Anna, the wife of the officer Karenin, goes to Moscow to visit her brother. On the way, she meets the charming cavalry officer Vronsky to whom she is immediately attracted. But in St. Petersburg’s high society, a relationship like this could destroy a woman’s reputation.

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    Cast

    • Keira KnightleyAnna Karenina
    • Jude LawKarenin
    • Aaron Taylor-JohnsonVronsky
    • Matthew MacfadyenOblonsky
    • Eric MacLennanMatvey
    • Kelly MacdonaldDolly
    • Alicia VikanderKitty
    • Domhnall GleesonLevin
    • Olivia WilliamsCountess Vronsky
    • Ruth WilsonPrincess Betsy Tverskoy

    Recommendations

    • 83

      The Playlist

      Both fascinatingly theatrical and thrillingly cinematic, a picture that's lingered on our minds more than we expected.
    • 80

      Empire

      If it doesn't ultimately engage your heart as it might, Anna Karenina is period drama at its most exciting, intoxicating and modern. Spellbinding.
    • 80

      Time

      Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish woman who has never felt erotic love; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame. It's a nervy performance, acutely attuned to the volcanic changes a naive creature must enjoy and endure on her first leap into mad passion. She helps make Anna Karenina an operatic romance worth singing about.
    • 75

      The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

      The results are generally refreshing. Much of the film takes place inside a theatre, as if to suggest the shenanigans of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy were a form of public entertainment.
    • 70

      Variety

      Setting most of the action in a mocked-up theater emphasizes the performance aspects of the characters' behavior, a strategy enhanced by lead thesp Keira Knightley's willingness to let her neurotic Anna appear less sympathetic than in previous incarnations.
    • 63

      Slant Magazine

      The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama.
    • 60

      The Guardian

      The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.
    • 50

      The Hollywood Reporter

      Dazzlingly designed and staged in a theatrical setting so as to suggest that the characters are enacting assigned roles in life, this tight and pacy telling of a 900 page-plus novel touches a number of its important bases but lacks emotional depth, moral resonance and the simple ability to allow its rich characters to experience and drink deeply of life.

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