anna karenina movie review

Life is but a stage, and Anna a player upon it

Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are two of the most notorious fallen women in literature. Karenina is prepared to lose all the advantages of high society in favor of the man she loves. Bovary abandons the man who loves her in an attempt to climb socially. As portrayed by Leo Tolstoy and Gustave Flaubert , both women are devastated by the prices they pay.

These are two of the great roles for many actresses and irresistible challenges for many filmmakers. There have been more than a dozen film versions of Karenina, most famously by Greta Garbo (1927 and 1935) and Vivien Leigh ; almost as many of Bovary, notably by Isabelle Huppert , Jennifer Jones and Pola Negri ( Mia Wasikowska will play her next year).

I mention these details to ask myself: What makes the two roles so enticing that every good actress must sooner or later read the novels and start to daydream? Both are mothers who essentially choose to abandon their single children. Both are the center of attention and gossip within their own circles. Both use opera houses as a stage for their affairs. Both pay dearly for their adulteries. The big difference is that Karenina is driven by sincere passion, and Bovary by selfishness and greed. Karenina inspires pity, Bovary gets what she deserves.

In Joe Wright’s daringly stylized new version of “Anna Karenina,” he returns for the third time to use Keira Knightley as his heroine. She is almost distractingly beautiful here and elegantly gowned to an improbable degree. One practical reason for that: As much as half of Wright’s film is staged within an actual theater and uses not only the stage but the boxes and even the main floor — with seats removed — to present the action. We see the actors in the wings, the stage machinery, the trickery with backdrops, horses galloping across in a steeplechase.

All the world’s a stage, and we but players on it. Yes, and particularly in Karenina’s case, because she fails to realize how true that is. She makes choices that are unacceptable in the high society of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and behaves as if they were invisible. She doesn’t seem to realize the audience is right there and paying close attention. She believes she can flaunt the rules and get away with it.

When we meet her, she is the pretty young wife of the important government minister Karenin ( Jude Law ). He is affectionate, but dry and remote. The love she lacks for him she lavishes on their 8-year-old son. At the train station to meet Dolly, the wife of her brother, Count Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), she sees the dashing young officer Vronsky ( Aaron Taylor-Johnson ), and for both of them, it’s love at first sight. He seems very young and perhaps not schooled in society’s rules. She should know better.

All society appears in public at the opera and grand balls (both staged by Wright in the theater), and after Anna and Vronsky meet at a ball, the die is cast. In this film, Wright and his screenwriter, Tom Stoppard , make adequate room for a landowner named Levin ( Domhnall Gleeson ), who for Tolstoy was the third major character and certainly the most attractive. Levin represents Tolstoy’s ideas in the novel: He is for abolishing serfdom and liberating his own serfs and has a near-mystical bond with the land and its cultivation.

He hopes to marry Kitty ( Alicia Vikander ), who has a crush on Vronsky, but at the ball, Vronsky has eyes only for Anna, and the outcome is happiness for Kitty and Levin.

Anna’s husband is not blind and soon knows about her affair. He is very firm. If they continue (affairs are not unknown in their circle), she must be discreet and secretive. Anna’s heart is too aflame to conceal her love with Vronsky, and she pays the price of separation from her husband and her beloved son. Society is satisfied. She has sinned, and she has been punished. Her punishment is far from over, and the lesson she dearly learns is that passion may be temporary, but scandal is permanent.

This is a sumptuous film — extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good. There are times when it is not quite clear if we are looking at characters in a story or players on a stage. Productions can sometimes upstage a story, but when the story is as considerable as “Anna Karenina,” that can be a miscalculation.

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.

Anna Karenina

• Keira Knightley as Anna
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Vronsky
• Jude Law as Karenin
• Alicia Vikander as Kitty
• Matthew MacFadyen as Oblonsky
• Domhnall Gleeson as Levin

Directed by

• Tom Stoppard

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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

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Infidelity, Grandly Staged

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By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 15, 2012

Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones — or let’s just say the average ones, to spare the feelings of hard-working wig makers and dialect coaches — are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will.

The British director Joe Wright has seemed to me — up to now — to belong to the dreary party of humility. His screen versions of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” are not terrible, just cautious and responsible. For all their technical polish and the admirable discipline of their casts, those films remain trapped in literariness. Instead of strong, risky interpretations, they offer crib notes and the pale flattery of imitation. The proof of their mediocrity is that admirers of Austen or Mr. McEwan will find no reason for complaint.

Mr. Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly — wonderfully — crazy terms. Pious Tolstoyans may knit their brows about the stylistic liberties Mr. Wright and the screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, have taken, but surely Tolstoy can withstand (and may indeed benefit from) their playful, passionate rendering of his masterpiece.

The challenge of “Anna Karenina” is that Tolstoy’s loose and baggy monster of a novel is more than large, bigger than great: it is comprehensive. As it glides among its many characters, reading their thoughts and dissecting their desires, the book becomes a vivid panorama of an entire society, you might even say a whole species. “Anna Karenina” does not take place, as movie-trailer voice-overs might say, “in a world” of such and such exotic customs. The book lives in the world, in the busy, contingent present tense of mid-19th-century Imperial Russia, which contained everything Tolstoy knew. To try to reproduce that world according to the canons of 21st-century movie realism would be to diminish and falsify his narrative, which ascends through cultural and social detail into a realm of universal emotion.

Mr. Wright’s brilliant gamble is to arrive at this level of emotional authenticity by way of self-conscious artifice. The cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are rendered as elaborate stage sets. (Sarah Greenwood is the production designer.) Characters make their way around props, past painted backdrops and through catwalks, ropes and backstage rigging. You get the sense that in these bureaucratic offices, ministerial meetings and aristocratic households, everyday life is a form of theater. To play your part in this intricately hierarchical society you must speak your lines, hit your marks, know your place and beware of improvisation.

But the film itself is the very opposite of stagy. The camera hurtles through the scenery as if in hungry pursuit; the lush colors of the upholstery and the costumes pulsate with feeling; the music (by Dario Marianelli) howls and sighs and the performances are fresh, energetic and alive. Compressing the important events of Tolstoy’s thousand pages into an impressively swift two hours and change, Mr. Wright turns a sweeping epic into a frantic and sublime opera.

The principal diva is Keira Knightley, her hair dyed black, her cheekbones veiled and her slender frame encased in gowns that function like satin mood rings. We sometimes talk about characters having arcs, but Anna Karenina is more like a human wave tank, rising and falling according to the contradictions of her temperament. The loyal, bored wife of a dry, virtuous government official (played with heartbreaking tact by Jude Law), Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow to calm a marital storm in the household of her brother, Stiva Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), who has been cheating on his wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald).

Oblonsky’s adultery foreshadows what is perhaps the most famous infidelity in literature, though his philandering is also trivial compared to the affair that Anna will pursue with Count Vronsky, a young military officer. I assume you know that it ends badly, but Mr. Wright’s real interest, like Tolstoy’s, is in everything that happens in between Anna’s first meeting with Vronsky and her final encounter with the wheels of a train. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, with curly blond hair, a crisp white uniform and the kind of mustache that would have melted hearts in an Upper West Side singles bar around 1974, turns Vronsky into a pretty, impulsive enigma. He has the eyes of a poet, but it is hard to shake the suspicion that this would-be romantic hero is, at heart, a shallow hedonist dominated by his imperious mother (Olivia Williams).

The possibility that Vronsky might not be worthy of Anna is a source of the agonizing pathos that follows their initial, headlong bliss. Their sun-dappled season of sexual ecstasy is followed by recrimination, insecurity and punishment. But the Anna-Vronsky folie à deux is hardly the only story “Anna Karenina” has to tell. “Why do they call it love, anyway?” Dolly’s younger sister, Kitty, asks in the throes of girlish romantic disappointment. Her sister replies, “Because it’s love,” and the whole movie can be taken as an unpacking of this apparent tautology — as a study in the varieties of love.

Kitty, a young woman of almost unbearable loveliness played by the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, is adored by Levin, a gloomy ginger-haired rural landowner. (“Harry Potter” fans will be pleased to see Domhnall Gleeson, the former Bill Weasley, in this role.) Levin is widely understood to be Tolstoy’s alter ego, and his idea of love — as the pure, ennobling union of souls — is an idealistic rebuke to the cynical amorality that festers in the cities. When it visits Levin, the film exchanges the trappings of theatricality for a lyrical naturalism, inhaling the fresh air of open fields and the homely aromas of a drafty wooden manor house.

Levin’s ardent goodness — his devotion to Kitty is connected to his belief in social justice and his faith in God — stands in contrast to Oblonsky’s cheerful selfishness, Karenin’s stern morality and Vronsky’s immature swooning. And “Anna Karenina,” in spite of the complicated woman at its center, is in many ways a study in the varieties of male behavior. This is partly because the world it depicts is one in which, as one character notes, the rules are made for and by husbands and fathers. It is men who act and choose, while women suffer, wait and watch.

How you measure the distance between that world — a bygone reality if you are reading Tolstoy; a constructed one if you are watching Mr. Wright’s movie — and the one we inhabit will be a matter of perspective. Mr. Stoppard and Mr. Wright offer “Anna Karenina” and its heroine to the gods of melodrama, who receive her gladly. But their film, wild and emotional as it is, does not quite hit the deep, resonant note of tragedy that would lift it above the merely (by which I mean the merely very) good. At the end you may be dazzled, touched and a bit tired. But, really, you should feel as if you had been hit by a train.

“Anna Karenina” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Overwhelming sexual passion, but with (very fancy) clothes on.

An earlier version of this review misidentified a character in “Anna Karenina.” He is Oblonsky, not Oblomov.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more

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Anna Karenina Reviews

While even skilled filmmakers would have trouble adapting Tolstoy’s novel in a straightforward form, Wright attempts a book-to-stage-to-film approach and, for the first time in his career, stretched his considerable talent thin.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 20, 2022

The machinery of the music box comes undone in our hands, but the light dancing on the little silver gears is still so beautiful and heartbreaking.

Full Review | Jul 2, 2021

The characters, so beautifully drawn by Tolstoy, are severely truncated in the film, functioning as relatively impoverished figures.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2021

Anna Karenina is a boldly constructed and beautiful film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4.0 | Sep 2, 2020

Enthralling, moving, exhilarating. Majestic and sweeping. The best and most brilliant interpretation of Tolstoy I have ever seen.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2019

One has to applaud Joe Wright's interpretation of 'Anna Karenina' which is a play on the Shakespeare adage, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players"

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 31, 2019

All of this calculated design, which plays like an astutely choreographed musical without any discernible music, only mutes our feelings for the roiling, raging passionate affair that's supposed to be transpiring before our eyes.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2019

A radiant Keira Knightley brings more depth to Tolstoy's heroine than you would ever expect. An ingenious adaptation, scripted by Tom Stoppard, frames lush visuals with a trompe l'oeil theatrical setting...

Full Review | Jul 31, 2019

Its nearly flawless craft is done at the expense of the story rather than in service of it, and that I think is its fatal mistake.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 8, 2019

Anna Karenina drags in the middle and rushes to its ugly end but the sets, the choreography, the glorious costumes and the secondary characters are pieces of a superior film.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2019

Heavily flawed and unapologetically indulgent, strong performances from its all-star cast and several sumptuous set-pieces just about set Wright's Anna Karenina aside from the madding crowd of bland costume romps.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2019

The constant flashes Anna has of a train rolling on a track -- an obvious foreshadow of her fate -- are beyond ridiculous.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 20, 2018

Wright has said he did not wish to make 'yet another period drama', and he's achieved this, has explored something new, but at an emotional cost.

Full Review | Sep 1, 2018

This Anna Karenina might not be Tolstoy, but it's the next best thing to a Baz Luhrmann extravaganza, and with even better costumes. The conceit is ingenious, the execution breathtaking (or breathless at a minimum).

Full Review | Jan 9, 2018

It's far from a perfect film, but Anna Karenina should be praised for its attempt to reinvent the wheel of stuffy costume-clad Masterpiece Theater for the big screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 7, 2017

At times, the theater-as-life concept creates too much emotional distance from the characters, but the actors give such human, sympathetic performances that even the biggest Anna fans will find themselves hoping for a happier ending.

Full Review | Oct 5, 2016

It makes for a wonderfully adventurous adaptation that is at times quite thrilling, but one which too often misses the mark.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 17, 2016

[Lack of] clarity is this slick adaptation's biggest fault.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10 | Aug 17, 2014

The look is gorgeous, of course, but seldom has so much aestheticization served so much heartlessness.

Full Review | Nov 5, 2013

So can we somehow make a bargain with the film world: no more Anna Kareninas? You're making idiots of yourselves.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2013

California Literary Review

Movie review: anna karenina.

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Photo: Laurie Sparham/©Focus Features

Anna Karenina

Directed by Joe Wright Screenplay by Tom Stoppard

Starring: Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kelly Macdonald

How long is Anna Karenina ? 130 minutes. What is Anna Karenina rated? R for some sexuality and violence.

Double Icing On Half A Cake

Joe Wright established himself practically overnight as a strong force in period drama based on popular books. He wowed with the relentlessly dour Atonement and then soared with a superb riff on Pride and Prejudice . Couple these efforts with the spunky, bizarro thriller Hanna and you should have no trouble seeing that Wright is a filmmaker both exuberant and offbeat.

His Anna Karenina , based on Leo Tolstoy’s monumentally acclaimed novel, is a parade of elegant design and intricate staging. It is not difficult to guess which Academy Award nominations its makers have in mind. By enclosing the cultural volatility of 19th-century cosmopolitan Russia in an ever-shifting magic lantern, those responsible get to show off and share some cutting insights on the artifice and deception required to sustain imperial high society.

Wright sets the epic tragedy of Anna, a fallen woman if ever there was one, almost entirely within a spacious theatre hall, with the main action unfolding on an impossibly marvelous series of collapsing and interlocking sets. The wings and backstage area become private places of intrigue and the catwalks above serve as sordid back alleys. There are trains and horse races and all the bustle of Moscow and St. Petersburg contained behind a single curtain. The complexity and perpetual motion of this living stage is nothing short of stunning.

The hard truth, impossible to dodge, is that this is not Tolstoy’s world. It is more like Hugo Cabret’s world, and from time to time it even flirts perilously with becoming Baz Luhrmann’s world. Tom Stoppard’s script, though consistently bright and entertaining, abridges the story painfully to fit the stylish construct. Anna Karenina may be the title character, but she need not be the sole focus of the plot. The supporting figures in her life lend important dramatic context to her abasement.

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is a shining star of the Russian nobility. Beautiful, kind, and admired by all, she is the wife of austere statesman Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) and doting mother to a young son. Her first action in the story is to visit her philandering brother “Stiva” Oblonsky (Matthew Mcfadyen) in hopes of smoothing the latest domestic crisis with his wife Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). In the course of this trip, Anna meets the roguish Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and an indiscrete liaison blooms between them. Vronsky is young, dashing, and passionate, three things Anna could never expect from her marriage, and despite some initial scruples she allows him to sweep her away to unwed bliss and public disgrace.

This dashes the hopes of Dolly’s sister Kitty (Alicia Vikander), previously Vronsky’s best girl, and cues the dual societies of Moscow and St. Petersburg to begin spreading word of the affair. Karenin, wishing to avoid a career-ending scandal for himself, quietly threatens to cut off Anna’s contact with her beloved child, and all respectable company begins shutting her out, despite attempts by her icy confidante Princess Betsy (Ruth Wilson) to keep her on everyone’s dance cards. Anna gains two major enemies in Vronsky’s fearsome mother (Olivia Williams) and Karenin’s loyal friend the Countess Lydia (Emily Watson). She soon realizes that her decision to live for love has cast her into permanent ruin while barely scorching her lover’s reputation. Things cannot and will not end well for her, come what may.

Meanwhile, Oblonsky’s friend Konstantin Levin (Domnhall Gleeson), an industrious landowner and farmer, is free to pursue the attentions of the heartbroken Kitty, offering her a moral haven on his farm, away from the machinations of the city. His embodiment of the salt of the earth poses a stark contrast to the duplicity and self-interest motivating Anna, Vronsky and their friends. Unfortunately, Joe Wright fails to give this essential element of the plot its fair share.

As a literary adaptation, Anna Karenina is impossible to condone fully. Wright and Stoppard have taken a definitive work of realist fiction and hammered it into an abstract, hyper-stylized masquerade. They have eloquently stated reasons for doing so, but the basic contradiction is inescapable. Though true to many key emotional beats in the tragedy of the eponymous Anna, this film in large part misses the point of its source narrative.

Most egregiously condensed is the relationship between Levin and Kitty, representing the most righteous aspects of the rural gentry. Those who live without guile or pretension get to escape the mad theatre and live in real life, you see. Levin’s distance from St. Petersburg, both physical and philosophical, establishes a crucial moral counterpoint to the scandal swallowing Anna and her loved ones alive. The touching humanity of the family he builds, in the face of unrest and imminent political storms, is the other half of this story, and has been all but deleted from Wright’s interpretation.

Anna Karenina is a tale of staggering size, and does not bear any degree of cutting down. Given the recent trend among blockbuster franchises, it seems a shame that Wright did not elect to split the movie into two parts. Given four or five hours, all the elaborate staging could work its magic without overshadowing the story or robbing it of weight. The fatal sin of this Anna Karenina is incompleteness. The quick pace and whimsical choreography work well in the story’s comical episodes (Oblonsky’s characterization and overall tone are spot-on), but in serious moments the gravity hardly has any time to sink in. The overriding levity of the film makes its emotional low points seem inappropriately droll.

Despite the constraints and distractions of the visual style, the cast and performances are first-rate. This is a piece knocking on the back door of greatness, and it manages to articulate an acceptable synopsis of Tolstoy’s novel for those who have not read the book beforehand. This is not as good a film as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , for example, but it is a damned sight easier to follow.

Its shortcomings would matter less if Anna Karenina were based on a less iconic literary work. It tells its story clearly enough, but often outweighs that story with its insistently fanciful elements. This movie is well worth seeing for the spectacle alone, but on later reflection the plot seems airy and elusive. As an overindulgent style exercise, it lacks the focus to become what the cast and crew surely had the talent to make it: a true classic.

Anna Karenina Trailer

Dan Fields is a graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in Film. He has written for the California Literary Review since 2010.

He is also co-founder and animator for Fields Point Pictures, and the frontman of Houston-based folk band Polecat Rodeo.

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Dan Fields is a graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in Film. He has written for the California Literary Review since 2010. He is also co-founder and animator for Fields Point Pictures, and the frontman of Houston-based folk band Polecat Rodeo. Google+ , Twitter

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Metacritic reviews

Anna karenina.

• 83 The Playlist Oliver Lyttelton The Playlist Oliver Lyttelton Both fascinatingly theatrical and thrillingly cinematic, a picture that's lingered on our minds more than we expected.
• 80 Empire 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 Richard Corliss Time Richard Corliss 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) Rick Groen The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen 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 Leslie Felperin Variety Leslie Felperin 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 Andrew Schenker Slant Magazine Andrew Schenker 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 Peter Bradshaw The Guardian Peter Bradshaw 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 Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy 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.
• 40 Total Film Neil Smith Total Film Neil Smith Pimped, primped and dressed to the nines, Joe Wright's Tols-toy story looks the business. Like a disappointing Christmas present, though, the pleasure quickly evaporates once you remove the shiny paper.
• 40 New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein Every unhappy movie is unhappy in its own way, and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is as boldly original a miscalculation as any you're likely to see.
• See all 41 reviews on Metacritic.com
• See all external reviews for Anna Karenina

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Parents' guide to, anna karenina.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 2 Reviews
• Kids Say 4 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Stylized retelling of Tolstoy classic best for older teens.

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…

Why Age 16+?

Gauzy scenes in close-up and soft focus imply strongly that a couple is having s

Some period-accurate smoking, as well as a few scenes of people drinking vodka a

A man is shown pinned under a train and his bloody insides are visible for a few

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

Any Positive Content?

While the movie makes it clear that love comes in many forms and, for the most p

Anna Karenina is a good mother, if not necessarily a good wife. Characters are c

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 .

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.

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.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

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.

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

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.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents Say (2)
• Kids Say (4)

Based on 2 parent reviews

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.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

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 : October 9, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.