Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
In Imperial Russia, Anna, wife of the officer Karenin, goes to Moscow to visit her brother. On the way, she meets charming cavalry officer Vronsky, to whom she's immediately attracted. But in St. Petersburg’s high society, a relationship like this could destroy a woman’s reputation.
Joe Wright's 2012 adaptation of Tolstoy's novel is visually audacious, staging much of the drama within a crumbling theatre as a bold meta-theatrical conceit that sets it apart from countless prior adaptations. Keira Knightley delivers a febrile, committed performance as Anna, and the ensemble — including Jude Law's unexpectedly sympathetic Karenin — is uniformly strong. Seamus McGarvey's cinematography is breathtaking, blending stagecraft and location shooting in ways that feel wholly singular. The novelty of the theatrical framing device is genuinely distinctive and divisive. However, the compressed narrative loses some of the novel's psychological depth, and the ending, while faithful, lands with less emotional devastation than it should, partly because the stylized approach keeps the audience at a slight remove from Anna's tragedy.