Anna Karenina

Directed by Joe Wright

(R)

**

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“This is an Anna Karenina that’s pretty much guaranteed to polarize audiences,” said Lou Lumenick inthe New York Post. Director Joe Wright has chosen to film much of it in an abandoned theater, but the gambit has “a distancing effect,” despite a fine lead performance by Keira Knightley. She makes the pampered Anna more neurotic and modern than we may be used to, but “the real surprise is Jude Law, who does the best screen work of his career in the usually thankless role” of Anna’s cuckolded husband. What’s “sorely lacking” is any chemistry between Anna and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who plays the young Russian officer she risks everything for, said Claudia Puig in USA Today. “Without a sense of smoldering passion,” this Anna just seems “blandly impetuous,” and Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky “a run-of-the-mill rake.” The film is “extravagantly staged and photographed, perhaps too much so for its own good,” said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. There are reasons why Leo Tolstoy’s tale about love and scandal in imperial Russia has been filmed many times. A director shouldn’t try to upstage it.