Film

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright's version doesn't pretend it's not a story: much of it plays out inside a crumbling theatre, sets swapping mid-scene, a ballroom becoming a racetrack becoming a train station. Tom Stoppard's script and Keira Knightley's brittle, magnetic Anna keep real feeling alive inside all that artifice. Ravishing, mannered, a little cold by design — for people who want tragic romance staged like an opera, not confessed like a diary.

TMDb rating6.7

If you liked this

Pride & Prejudice2005

Same director, same star, same appetite for swirling camerawork and charged glances — but here Wright lets romance actually breathe and succeed. Watch his instincts applied to a happier story.

But Cosier, gentler, and ultimately kind to its heroine — you may miss the operatic ruin Anna Karenina builds toward.

Pride & Prejudice poster

Atonement2007

Wright again, with lovers separated by class and a single catastrophic misjudgement. Same lush, painterly camera, same interest in how a rigid social order crushes private feeling.

But War-torn and structurally trickier, with a formal twist near the end that some find clever and others find a cheat.

Atonement poster

Doctor Zhivago1965

The other great doomed-Russian-romance epic — snow, revolution, and a love affair that society and history conspire to destroy. Widescreen, unashamedly romantic, hugely influential.

But Over three hours and more interested in historical sweep than in Anna's kind of claustrophobic, interior unravelling.

Doctor Zhivago poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Brief Encounter1945

Same engine as Anna's story — a respectable woman, a train, a forbidden attraction, and a society that makes the affair impossible — but told with total restraint instead of operatic sweep.

British, black-and-white, decades older, and just as obsessed with a woman risking everything for an affair she can't have — conducted almost entirely in a train station.

But Clipped, repressed, and very English — no lavish ballrooms, just two people quietly destroying themselves over cups of tea.

Brief Encounter poster
More like this (8)

The Age of Innocence1993

Scorsese's quietest, most devastating film: desire strangled by drawing-room etiquette instead of bullets. Every glance is a small act of violence in a world built entirely on appearances.

But No scandal, no collapse — just decades of restraint. If you wanted Anna's fireworks, this is all slow-burn ash.

The Age of Innocence poster

War & Peace2016no page yet

Same author, same aristocratic Russia, and six hours of room for Tolstoy's ideas about love, war and mortality to actually unfold rather than compress.

But Sprawling and multi-stranded rather than one woman's tragedy — a different, more hopeful shape entirely.

Far from the Madding Crowd2015

A fiercely independent woman, three suitors, and a Victorian countryside every bit as beautifully shot. Carey Mulligan gives Bathsheba the same complicated dignity Knightley gives Anna.

But Gentler stakes and a genuinely happy ending — you won't get anywhere near Anna's freefall.

Far from the Madding Crowd poster

Marie Antoinette2006

Sofia Coppola stages court life as pure theatre too — artificial, gorgeous, aware of its own performance. A sister film in style if not in plot.

But Looser and more impressionistic, with an anachronistic soundtrack that either delights or completely takes you out of it.

Marie Antoinette poster

The Great Gatsby2013

Luhrmann's maximalist, theatrical excess is the closest thing to Wright's stagecraft you'll find in a Jazz Age setting — doomed love dressed up as spectacle.

But Glossier and shallower, trading Tolstoy's moral weight for glitter and a thumping modern soundtrack.

The Great Gatsby poster

Bright Star2009no page yet

Jane Campion's hushed, aching account of Keats and Fanny Brawne — a tragic romance told with almost no artifice at all, just light, fabric, and feeling.

But Small, slow and deliberately unglamorous — after Wright's spectacle, it may feel like a whisper after a shout.

Fatal Attraction1987

The same moral machinery — desire outside marriage leading inexorably to ruin — rebuilt as a glossy erotic thriller instead of a period tragedy.

Strip away the corsets and the tragedy becomes a thriller: an affair that starts as escape and ends as annihilation, with a society just as unforgiving underneath the '80s gloss.

But Pure pulp — lurid, contrived, occasionally silly, with none of the literary ambition or moral complexity Anna Karenina takes seriously.

Fatal Attraction poster

Loveless2017no page yet

Same country, same institution under strain, but a century later and stripped of every ounce of glamour — the aristocratic tragedy replaced by a modern, unadorned domestic wasteland.

A contemporary Russian film about a marriage curdling into cruelty and a family quietly disappearing into indifference — bleak, precise, and unmistakably in Tolstoy's moral territory.

But Cold, spare, and without a shred of Anna's romantic grandeur — this is Russian society's emptiness with no beauty to soften it.

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