Anna Karenina and Les Misérables’ Producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner to be Honored by the Hollywood Film Awards

Posted by Sasha Stone on Sep 19, 2012 in Anna Karenina, Awards, Les Miserables | 2 comments

The 16th Annual Hollywood Film Awards, presented by the “Los Angeles Times, ” announced today that it will be honoring producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner with this year’s “Hollywood Producers Award.”
More info at the Hollywood Film Awards
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Keira Knightley Singled out for Brave Performance in Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Sep 11, 2012 in Anna Karenina | 46 comments

TIME mag just wrote a rave review for Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina. Knightley has been quietly challenging the roles she seemed destined to play with last year’s A Dangerous Method and now, with Anna Karenina. Richard Corliss writes of Knightley:

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.

Philip French writes:

Still, Knightley’s Anna has the right combination of passion, confusion, cruelty and near madness, and there’s a brilliant moment (which comes out of the novel) where she reveals her physical revulsion for her husband by angrily criticising his irritating habit of cracking his knuckles.

But there is no getting around the fact that the film’s reception will be mixed. It appears as though Joe Wright turned and did something no one expected him to do – he filmed the Anna Karenina no one expected him to make. Did you all just think Anna Karenina would be kind of by-the-numbers Wright and Knightley? But the critics instead seemed half-baffled by it.  It is perhaps one of those films you either go with or you don’t. Unfortunately, it is one of the few Big Oscar Movies with a plot that revolves around a female character. In fact, it might be the ONLY one. I’m rooting for it but haven’t yet seen it.
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Lovely New Poster for Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Jul 7, 2012 in Anna Karenina, Posters | 22 comments

From FirstShowing:

Bigger version under cut.
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New Pics from Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina

Posted by Sasha Stone on Jun 8, 2012 in 85th Academy Awards, Anna Karenina, featured, Joe Wright | 56 comments

Beautiful pics from the new Wright/Knightley period pic, Anna Karenina. Directors never seem to tire of dressing Knightley up in the old fashioned way.  Anna Karenina is shortlisted as a potential Oscar contender, which only means it adds up to Oscar catnip by all accounts: pretty white people in a period film with heavy subject matter. Or you could say Joe Wright (Atonement), plus Tom Stoppard doing the adaptation, plus Knightley and Jude Law=Oscar in one way or another. Let’s start with Best Picture, but you could probably add Best Actress, Costume, Art Direction without breaking  a sweat.
The Oscar game is just too easy sometimes.
So this only has to not screw up to be one of the remaining contenders. It should do very well with the HFPA to get things started off nicely. How can you say that without having seen it yet, you might ask? Practice, practice.  The novel has been remade into many films over the years. And now Joe Wright and Keira Knightley will add their mark to the pole in this, their 3rd collaboration together.
Gallery after the cut.