Review of Anna Karenina (2012) by Jeremyp — 09 Dec 2012

If you want Tolstoy as arty fiction first and tragedy a distant second then you might like this. If you want a story told straight you won't. By focusing on staging the story as a play inside a play, rather than telling the tale as a novel the result was to pull me away from all the characters.

I even yearned for Anna to go to the station much more quickly than she did. The choice for Vronsky was a poor one, all blond mustache and little macho, and Knightley's straying upper lip always distracts me.

If I'd wanted to see the bloody thing on stage I'd have gone to a theatre, not a cinema.