Anna Karenina
Focus Features | Release Date: November 16, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
63
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
28
Mixed:
12
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayNov 15, 2012
While Wright's self-conscious theatricality and dollhouse aesthetic conjure comparisons to Baz Luhrmann and Wes Anderson, he outstrips both those filmmakers in moral seriousness and maturity. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottNov 15, 2012
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. Read full review
90
Boxoffice MagazineDavid EhrlichNov 12, 2012
The result is a masterpiece of moving pieces, a dizzying and obscenely beautiful film that boils down Tolstoy's text to its most basic elements by making literal the theater of high society. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversNov 15, 2012
The story has been filmed many times, but never with this kind of erotic charge. Knightley is glorious, her eyes blazing with a carnal yearning that can turn vindictive at any perceived slight. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianMarc MohanNov 23, 2012
Whatever the interpretation, Stoppard and Wright have demonstrated that Anna's saga has lost none of its power. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnNov 15, 2012
Wright's extraordinary long takes draw you into the universe of Anna Karenina with a seamless approach that a straightforward literary adaptation could never accomplish. Read full review
83
The PlaylistOliver LytteltonSep 3, 2012
Both fascinatingly theatrical and thrillingly cinematic, a picture that's lingered on our minds more than we expected. Read full review
80
SalonAndrew O'HehirNov 15, 2012
Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it's both daring and brilliant. Read full review
80
TimeRichard CorlissSep 10, 2012
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. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerSep 3, 2012
If it doesn't ultimately engage your heart as it might, Anna Karenina is period drama at its most exciting, intoxicating and modern. Spellbinding. Read full review
75
Miami HeraldConnie OgleNov 29, 2012
Wright's film is visually stimulating to be sure, but he never loses sight of the raw human emotions that make Anna Karenina a classic. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallNov 28, 2012
It's an audacious mashup that Baz Luhrmann would approve, lending freshness to Tolstoy's too-often-told tale. Read full review
75
St. Louis Post-DispatchJoe WilliamsNov 23, 2012
Even more than most versions of Anna Karenina, this chamber piece is heated by two combustible characters, not by the winds of war and peace. Read full review
75
New York PostLou LumenickNov 15, 2012
As cleverly adapted by Tom Stoppard, this is an Anna Karenina that's pretty much guaranteed to polarize audiences. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliNov 15, 2012
The best thing that can be said about Wright's immersion into the world of Tolstoy is that it's interesting - a quality not always true of Anna Karenina adaptations. The movie also doesn't feel rushed, successfully capturing more of the novel's secondary stories into its fabric. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick GroenSep 18, 2012
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. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 20, 2012
It's not that the artificiality doesn't work sometimes. It does, as some of the scenes are gorgeous to look at. But too often it serves as more of a distraction than an effective tool for telling the story. Read full review
70
Village VoiceNick PinkertonNov 13, 2012
Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist - at least until the end of his life - so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening. Read full review
70
VarietyLeslie FelperinSep 3, 2012
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. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsNov 14, 2012
If only the emotions of the performances, the themes of the story, and Wright's cinematic virtuosity synced up more often. A lopsided abridgement that speeds through the plot doesn't help. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumNov 14, 2012
In making the radical artistic choice to tell the story as if it were being enacted by players on a stage, Wright falls passionately in love with his own fanciful artifices. Read full review
65
MovielineAlison WillmoreNov 18, 2012
Scripted by playwright Tom Stoppard, the film labors to fit Tolstoy's sprawling story into its two hour and ten minute runtime by drawing its characters with minimal lines. Read full review
65
NPRElla TaylorNov 15, 2012
Inner life comes hard to Knightley, and she never gets a grip on the mounting emotional turmoil that threatens to crush Anna as she progresses from stylish young hipster-about-town to kept woman to bereft mother to paranoid social pariah. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia PuigNov 15, 2012
Though energetic, daring and gorgeous to behold, this re-imagining of Tolstoy's classic tale lacks a viable sense of passion, holding the characters at arm's length and glossing over social issues. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrNov 15, 2012
The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer's emotions. Leo Tolstoy's classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 15, 2012
At its most frantic the cutting and staging here veers perilously close to Baz Luhrmann "Moulin Rouge!" territory for comfort. ... I'd rather have seen Wright's carefully elaborated production on a stage, instead of in a movie partly on a stage. Read full review
63
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertNov 14, 2012
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. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerNov 8, 2012
The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottNov 30, 2012
That storytelling, however, is uneven, ranging from something approaching tedium to moments that are downright wonderful (such as the sweetest of scenes, involving two young lovers -- played by and Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson -- and a stack of children's blocks). Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanNov 15, 2012
The film's structure is so boldly conceived it seems unfair to focus on flaws. But the central problem is undeniable: There is no chemistry whatsoever between the leads. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 9, 2012
The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel. Read full review
50
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanNov 29, 2012
The arc of the 800-page novel, crammed into 130 minutes, becomes a line as flat as the heart monitor of a dead patient. A story that ought to possess the mad grandeur of an opera acquires the tedious regularity of soap opera. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesNov 28, 2012
There's no denying the dazzling effect, but a fireworks sequence midfilm only underscores the sad fact that there's no lasting illumination here, only the fast-burn spitzing of bang snaps. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyNov 15, 2012
In the end Anna Karenina lets you down - visually stunning, emotionally overwrought, beautifully acted, but not quite right. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 6, 2012
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. Read full review
42
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 16, 2012
One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor." Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternNov 15, 2012
This latest iteration of the Tolstoy classic was clearly the product of audacious thinking, stylishly applied. Still, the thinking was as wrongheaded as it was hollow-hearted. Yet another elaborate production chases its audience away. Read full review
40
Time OutKeith UhlichNov 13, 2012
The more the visual ephemera piles up, the more the emotional thrust of the story gets buried beneath all the monotonous pageantry. (Anna's many tête-à-têtes with her two lovers - especially a should-be-dizzying dance-seduction scene - are frigid pomp without any real heat.) Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNov 12, 2012
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. Read full review
40
Total FilmNeil SmithSep 3, 2012
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. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 15, 2012
You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train. Read full review
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