More photos, TIFF Reviews, Interviews and Q&A videos of Keira Knightley & Matthew Macfadyen at 'Anna Karenina' Premiere - TIFF 2012
Also, Empire Online has an Exclusive: Behind The Scenes on Anna Karenina photos
A glimpse behind the red curtain of Joe Wright's romance
Joe Wright's Anna Karenina (starring former Pride & Prejudice stars Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen) now showing in UK Cinemas and will open in US Theaters November 16th!
Check out more new photos of KK, MM, and JW at TIFF 2012 premiere of Anna Karenina, plus KK and MM video interviews, AK Cast & Crew Q&A, and AK TIFF Reviews below...
(source: Eric Charbonneau - wireimage | getty images | keira knightley fan)
Anna Karenina premiere Q&A at Toronto Film Festival - September 7, 2012
(source: epnebelle2)
I made a couple collages below of Keira & Matthew's lovely moments
at AK TIFF 2012 Q&A
(source: fashiongodess)
DP/30 @TIFF 2012: Sneak Peek, Day One
(source: TheHotButton)
Watch: Jude Law and Keira Knightly on Daybreak
Alicia Vikander and Matthew Macfadyen Interview -- Anna Karenina
(source: Empiremagazine)
"Keira & I, we're tickled to work again, together, you know...and two totally different parts, you know...so it was lovely." (Matthew Macfadyen)
"I was very flattered to be asked to work with Joe (Wright) again. It was great. It was really good, fun." (Matthew Macfadyen).
UK Press Conference: Anna Karenina
How was being reunited with Matthew Macfadyen again but this time playing brother and sister?
Keira Knightley: We just giggled. I think it was because we were trying to learn to dance and initially it was just us together. And we just found it absolutely hysterical so we brought that into our brotherly and sisterly relationship.
You’ve worked with Keira and Matthew before and, indeed, you work with a lot of people over and over again. Is that something deliberate?
Joe Wright: Definitely! I like the idea of a company atmosphere and I like working with the same actors and crew members – more so with crew. When Matthew [Macfadyen] was doing Pride & Prejudice he had to be very serious and sombre and I knew that there was another side of Matthew that I’d really like to engage with and so it seemed like a perfect opportunity for that.
Matthew, it looked like you had a lot of fun with Oblonsky?
Matthew Macfadyen: Yeah, 90% of it was the moustache! It just sort of gave me a lift. No, it was a lot of fun.
More Anna Karenina TIFF 2012 Film Reviews
"I was very flattered to be asked to work with Joe (Wright) again. It was great. It was really good, fun." (Matthew Macfadyen).
UK Press Conference: Anna Karenina
How was being reunited with Matthew Macfadyen again but this time playing brother and sister?
Keira Knightley: We just giggled. I think it was because we were trying to learn to dance and initially it was just us together. And we just found it absolutely hysterical so we brought that into our brotherly and sisterly relationship.
You’ve worked with Keira and Matthew before and, indeed, you work with a lot of people over and over again. Is that something deliberate?
Joe Wright: Definitely! I like the idea of a company atmosphere and I like working with the same actors and crew members – more so with crew. When Matthew [Macfadyen] was doing Pride & Prejudice he had to be very serious and sombre and I knew that there was another side of Matthew that I’d really like to engage with and so it seemed like a perfect opportunity for that.
Matthew, it looked like you had a lot of fun with Oblonsky?
Matthew Macfadyen: Yeah, 90% of it was the moustache! It just sort of gave me a lift. No, it was a lot of fun.
More Anna Karenina TIFF 2012 Film Reviews
5 stars (out of 5) rating!
Anna Karenina is a story about love, and its place in society. It’s also a whirling, passionate film that picks up the phrase “all the world’s a stage” and runs with it. This is period drama stripped of the confines of realism. Is it perfect? No. But it is theatre, bold and striking, a little bit funny, and in a nutshell, achingly beautiful.
In comparison then to the writing and visuals, it is the acting that left the least impact. This is fairly odd: normally actors are the face of a film, the gilt on a visual foundation, but here it is the visuals that gild and the performances that support. Knightley and Law give fairly broad performances, strong but without much subtlety. Gleeson and Vikander are more noticeable: it is their chemistry that makes the aforementioned climactic scene such a delight. But still, the performances are not Karenina’s selling point.TIFF FILM REVIEW: Keira Knightley in ‘Anna Karenina’ via The Cliff Edge
Rather, Anna Karenina is a film of visual beauty, theatrical flow and endless movement. It is an immersive rush of an experience, a multifaceted exploration of love, and a tragic commentary on how society constrains the expression of pure feelings, while enforcing unhappy stability. It is, without a doubt, one of the best films of 2012. But this greatness is not elitist. Anna Karenina may be built on highbrow source material, but the film wraps this up in a slick package, easy on modern eyes, resulting in a film that is intelligent but also incredibly immersive.
TORONTO – With a smart and entertaining script by Tom Stoppard and vital contributions from his creative team, Joe Wright has rendered a sumptuous film version of “Anna Karenina” starring Keira Knightley (pictured) that will cause a rush on sales of Leo Tolstoy 1870’s novel.
The film is so gorgeous and the music so perfect that the Motion Picture Academy might as well give composer Dario Marianelli (Wright’s “Atonement”) his second Oscar now, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran (all nominated for “Atonement”) will be right there with him.
It’s the third Joe Wright film to star Knightley and the collaboration obviously is very good for them. The actress has never looked more radiantly beautiful than she does in “Anna Karenina” but now she is more womanly where before she always seemed like a girl.
Matthew Macfadyen steals every scene he’s in as Anna’s cheerfully unrepentant hedonist brother and Kelly Macdonald portrays his wife’s sadness and forgiveness effectively. Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander grow increasingly appealing as an earnest young landowner and the young beauty he wishes to wed.
Wright contrasts cleverly Knightley’s remarkable stillness in many shots with her sudden energy as her passion takes hold. It’s an impressive performance as Anna’s willfulness does not always inspire sympathy.
Marianelli’s music matches the film’s mix of spectacle and intimacy with lush orchestrations and delicate solos from the likes of celloist Caroline Dale. If the film gains the box office traction it deserves, then “Anna Karenina” will be well in the running when the awards come along.
Film Review: Anna Karenina via State Magazine
Director Joe Wright and Keira Knightley’s third outing was set up to be a walk in the park; another slightly updated venture for the period drama. Another Atonement, Pride and Prejudice revisited. A careful pace, recognisably distinguished locations, and an enjoyable plot treatment. Anna Karenina, however, plays fast and loose with these established hallmarks; seizing attention from the beginning with curiosity, and following through on the up-swing with triumphant aplomb.
Matthew MacFadyen—also of Wright’s stable—delivers amusement behind the moustache of lovable vagabond and serial womaniser Oblonsky. Performance and mise-en-scéne are complemented magnificently by ornate and wonderfully choreographed sequences such as a grandiose ball, and the furiously intense horse race.
Anna Karenina is ambitious, clever, curious and fantastical all at the same time. Tied together with jaw-dropping camerawork and a score that would melt steel, Wright’s third outing with Knightley may serve to be his finest.
4 stars (out of 5) rating!
Anna Karenina Review via Screen JabberThe precocious talent of director Joe Wright has seen him take on two period dramas adapted from well known books in Atonement and Pride and Prejudice. Wright, despite naturalistic adaptations of both books, still delivered cinematic flair and Oscar nominations for his lead actresses. Working again with Working Title and producer Paul Webster, Wright - having planned another realistic adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - decided to adapt a completely new approach to a period drama. Reading that the Russian aristocracy of the late 19th Century lived life 'as if on stage' the director has created a bold, perhaps controversial, new vision for Tolstoy's Russian classic.Keira Knightly plays the titular Anna and Jude Law is her ministerial 'saint' of a husband, Alexei Karenin. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Count Alexei Vronsky. Using a myriad of ever-changing and flexible sets along with scenes of typical Russian landscapes, Wright has created a surrealist take on the novel. Every dance is stylised and some set pieces mimick staged theatre pieces while playing as straight realism.
Matthew Macfadyen as Anna's brother Oblonsky supplies the humorous relief to the ever mounting tragedy develops around Anna. Knightly is once again impressive, allowing the highly stylised approach to assist and not distract from her performance of a woman experiencing love and social denouncement.
3 and half stars rating!
Knightley is excellent in the title role. She imbues the character of Anna with the right amount of longing and passion, trapped in her loveless marriage to Karenin (Law), and knocked sideways when she meets womanising cavalry officer Vronsky (Taylor-Johnson). Their scandalous relationship rocks the high society patrons of Moscow and St Petersburg. The actress has drawn brickbats from certain quarters in the past, entirely unjustified in my opinion. She's choosing interesting, esoteric projects such as Last Night and Seeking a Friend For the End of the World now – and giving fine performances to boot – and was courageous in her interpretation of Sabina in A Dangerous Method. OK, so she didn't successfully pull off the character, but top marks to her for being so bold in trying. One must admire her for not playing safe. Here she charts Anna's blossoming from shy wife and mother to ripe wanton lover to unstable mental case with sure footed aplomb. It's a terrific turn and she plays it to the hilt – a major advance for her.
Her co-stars are equally solid, with a very fine turn from Law as her unsympathetic husband. He underplays skilfully – a cold glance, a subtle shift in movement, never allowing the emotions to seep through fully. And Taylor-Johnson is a convincing stud succumbing to true love for the first time. The three principles are well supported by Gleeson as the highly sensitive friend of Anna's caddish brother (MacFadyen, relishing the chance to cut loose for a change) and Vikander as the object of his affection, the young beauty who is distressed and hurt to be passed over by Vronsky for Anna. These actors surrender to Wright's vision and Tom Stoppard's adaptation with ready enthusiasm.
Anna Karenina: Keira Knightley Takes Center Stage in Bold Adaptation via Time Magazine
In the intelligently ecstatic new adaptation of Anna Karenina adaptation written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Joe Wright, all the world’s a stage — a 19th-century theater whose ornate confines are the setting for scenes taking place in Anna’s home town of St. Petersburg and in the social and political center of Moscow. Steeplechase horses gallop across the boards; a quiet dinner or a military banquet may be staged there. And when Anna (Keira Knightley) and Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) meet, the theatrical intensity of their first moments in each other’s arms makes those around them not fellow performers but mute spectators, awed and aghast.
Wright’s strategy of setting most of the action on a stage (his idea, not Stoppard’s) takes some getting used to. In early scenes, the headlong bustle of Seamus McGarvey’s camera and the arch playing of the actors, many of them rendering comic judgments by sucking in their cheeks, prime the spectator to expect that this will be an Anna reduced to opera buffo. The pace continues furious, but the characters soon find a home in this bold new structure — one ornamented by Dario Marianelli’s luscious score. In a way this is opera, but grand opera, with the emotions running at fever pitch and the actors as likely to dance (choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) as walk. Vronsky’s and Anna’s meeting at a formal ball expresses their love through dance, exactly as the classic routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did in their ’30s musicals. As Vronsky and Anna whirl, the other dancers freeze. Everyone can detect the expert passion in their movements; the couple might have been spotted in the act of love.Anna Karenina (2012) Film Review via Film 4 4 stars (out of 5)!
The novel has been filmed at least two dozen times, including silent and sound-movie versions, in 1927 and 1935, with Greta Garbo, and a 1948 film with Vivien Leigh. Two of the most incandescent stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age would be tough competition for Knightley, if she were playing the same kind of Anna. But guided by Wright, her director for Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, 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.
The first thing to say about Joe Wright's 2012 take on Leo Tolstoy's epic novel of doomed romance in Russian society is that it's unlikely to appeal to those with a taste for traditional costume drama. With a cast comprising Keira Knightley, Aaron Johnson (billed Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Jude Law and Matthew MacFayden, and a tricksy central conceit - much of the film is set in a theatre - dependant on the notion that high society in 19th-century Moscow consisted of people conducting themselves as if they were on display at all time, it's a red rag to those who prefer capital-'R'-Realism and casts composed entirely of national treasures and critical darlings.
I loved it, though. Wright is trying (occasionally too hard, yes, but that's certainly the direction to err in with something like this) to do something distinctive and different and entertaining and magical. And for the most part, he succeeds.
VerdictRead more Anna Karenina Reviews on RT here!
Tolstoy's novel rendered in exquisite Faberge egg form, Joe Wright's vision of aristocratic passions and hypocrisies is closer to a ballet or opera than a boring old period adaptation and is all the better for it.
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