Anna Karenina will be gorgeous

Atonement lenser Seamus McGarvey & composer Dario Marianelli are back on board for Joe Wright's Anna Karenina so we know that, at the very least, it will look & sound gorgeous.

Joe Wright brought an interesting creative vision to both Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, so it will be interesting to see what he brings to Anna Karenina.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World - Trailer

Steve Carell & Keira Knightley are an odd pairing, but so were Steve Carell & Juliette Binoche. Not at all necessarily a bad thing. With Patton Oswalt, Connie Britton, Melanie Lynskey & Gillian Jacobs along for the ride, hopefully Focus Features makes the best of a cute idea.

Keira Knightley, No Bodice

In other news, Keira Knightley will also be appearing in a new film in which she is not decked out in period gear. To be fair, 9 out of Keira's 25 full-length, feature films have been contemporary roles, but the remaining 16, as well as her biggest hitters, have been period films. Not that they don't suit her.

In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Keira Knightley teams up with Steve Carrell to play neighbours on a road trip as an asteroid approaches earth. On the more serious side of comedy, then. Steve & Keira are an odd pairing that could bear dividends, or fall flat. Keira's comic abilities remain untested, but Carrell is pretty good at combining comedy & drama. An interesting outing for both stars, then. Let's hope for the best.

Joe Wright's Anna Karenina

Joe Wright reunites with Keira Knightley (&, less excitingly, Matthew MacFadyan) to adapt Leo Tolstoy's classic novel of infidelity & social shame in Tsarist Russia. It's a good thing, too, because Anna Karenina has only been brought to the screen 24 times before (17 times on the big screen, 7 times on the small) between 1910 & 2009 (spanning pretty much the entire history of cinema). Only a small handful of these have been successful adaptations, however, so perhaps there is merit in Wright revisiting the material.

Keira Knightly joins a distinguished & sizeable population of actresses to have filled the Karenina shoes (including Greta Garbo, twice, Vivien Leigh, Sophie Marceau, Jacqueline Bisset, Helen McCrory, Claire Bloom, Tatyana Drubich & Tatyana Samojlova), with a total of two major award nominations among them (both for Garbo).


It seems at once a good & predictable idea for Wright to return to period literary adaptations. With Keira Knightly. His Pride & Prejudice was fresh & - considering they whittled it down to 127 minutes - effective, while his Atonement was audacious & intoxicating. So, although his recent foray into stylised contemporary fight flicks leaves me wanting much more, it will be interesting to see what he does with Anna Karenina, and if Keira Knightly's on-going bid for a second Oscar nomination will finally pay off.

Plot-wise, Anna is the young wife of an older aristocrat who - when her husband (Jude Law) won't grant her a divorce - embarks on a scandalous affair with the young & wealthy Count Vronsky (Aaron Johnson), changing both their social fates forever. Anna Karenina has recently adorned the burdensome title of "Best Novel Ever Written", although this is likely due more to Tolstoy's prose & style, which bridged the gap from realist to modernist novels (thanks, Wikipedia, for making me sound smart), than his  plot, so the trick for Wright will be translating it to the screen in a suitably beguiling visual language that is true to its source, but appealing to a modern audience. But that is what Wright is good at.

A Dangerous Method - Trailer

Viggo Mortensen. David Cronenberg. Michael Fassbender.

Three very good reasons to put this on your must-see list. But if you need more, it also stars Keira Knightley & Vincent Cassell and concerns the friendship and psychological constructs of Carl Jung (Fassbender) & Sigmund Freud (Mortensen). And Jung's exploration of his methods through an affair with one of his patients (Knightley).

Cronenberg is never light watching, but he is on a career high. His last two films with Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) were powerful, violent and intensely constructed films, so tackling a period romantic psychological drama is an intriguing next move. Knightley seems on the borderline of overacting, but I doubt that Cronenberg would allow that, so it should be a good vehicle for her.

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