Truly Dreadful Film

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

'Anna Karenina' (2012) makes sure no one goes back to Leo Tolstoy's classic. The novel, 'Anna Karenina' is an extensive study of love, betrayal, pride and prejudice, to name a few. It's largely made up of interior monologues and smoothly switches between points of view of multiple characters. It touches on the ego and explores timeless dilemmas that stay as relatable today as they once were. Unfortunately, while the book preserves the Russian flair for the romantic without seeming fake, Joe Wright's film does the exact opposite. The flair for the fake burns out any traces of romanticism. Firstly, the film simply does not do justice to the themes it works with. With enough material in the book, the director chose to omit crucial chapters which serve to clarify the characters' decisions and build tension for important narrative twists. Without them, it seems as if Karenina, Vronsky, and Levin were mentally ill as they base their most important life-choices on whims. The screenplay focuses on telling the story of a woman torn between two men. I think I might have seen that before... Without knowing Anna's motives and her nuanced fight with herself and society, the film gets reduced to a love story between a moody, rich diva and a narcissistic soldier - hardly the premise for an epic. The setting hinders that simplistic meaning too. Wright applies a theatrical, over-the-top convention, which drowns the meaning, for the sake of cheap dances and background gimmicks. With everyone dancing, entering different settings, which are being constructed as we watch, the classic turns into a cheap play which relies on distractions to keep the audience's attention. With that, the film seems to be apologizing for its own existence. The over-saturation permeates the acting as well. Every gesture, every sigh, every word of Anna's is exaggerated and ends up insincere. Same goes for Kitty and Dolly. The décor oozes with gold and silver. The costumes, beautiful as they are, look like carefully selected props and not clothes that people lived in. Always creaseless, and starched to the point of standing up on their own, the gowns occupy more space than the actors. The fabrics rustle competing with the soundtrack. All in all, a cringe-worthy spectacle you pray to be over.

A beautiful and well seen member of the Russian High-Class society, married and having one child, falls in love with a charming count with whom she starts an affair. From there on, her life takes a dramatic turn for the worse, as she wasn't expecting most of the people's reactions after her deed.It's a movie which wants to present how a person's reputation can alter so quickly after using the heart to think, instead of the brain, leaving all possible consequences aside. Somehow, it managed to enroll its plot in a lengthy and boring way, with little interest gained along the way. You'll be baffled by the main characters' decisions, while the results are to be expected after such foolish judgement. While the movie itself is average at most in almost every single way, the actors do a really good job in building their characters, helped a bit by the provided dialog. Too bad that the plot was such a let-down.

Anna Karenina follows a married woman who falls for another man and, despite her attempts to fight her feelings, ultimately engages in an affair. The movie won an Oscar for it's costumes and they are good. They're extravagant and very fitting of the time period. It had a few good ideas when it comes to story and presentation, but it was clear that it was shooting for style over substance here. The movie at first plays itself out like a play being performed on stage, with set pieces moving and changing while the actors are still acting on stage, but it quickly abandoned that idea for typical directing. I had two problems with this movie that really weighed it down. One of them was the pacing. It's so boring. The characters are impossible to relate to, and most everything about it is largely generic. We've seen it all before, so there really wasn't anything going for it. My second problem was the length. It was way too long, and even faked out it's ending on occasion. I found myself begging for it to just end already. Combine bad pacing with too much on the run time, and you've got a recipe for disaster. And that's what this is. Overall Anna Karenina had some good ideas, but is basically just a generic snorefest. In the end I wouldn't recommend it.

Someone made me view this picture on DVD. But the enclosure told that the screenplay was of Tom Stoppard. I acutely froze. I had seen his picture "Parades End". In this picture he lets a man who lives in a nearby hell choose for his "redemption" a fearless suffragette. My youth learned me that people who know no anguish or fear are a terror to themselves and the society thy live in. So, I watched the movie and the only emotion that came to me was disgust, very strong. I am afraid that Tom Stoppard ranks with Oliver Stone and (yes!) even with Harold Pinter. The DVD opens with a preview of "Les Miserables". It closes with the sentence "Live has destroyed my dream". That reminded me of another picture in which a man with a great bottle of whiskey in his hand says: "Live does this to us". I am afraid that live does not do this and people who give this utterance are moved by only one drive: blood thirst.Enjoy.