The great and showy style of Joe Wright's movie Anna Karenina is worth seeing

I've read some harsh reviews of director Joe Wright's movie, Anna Karenina. We saw it yesterday. The harsh reviews are right about some things. The surface of the movie depends on its surreal staging, part theater, part ballet -- the director sets the movie in an old theater, and intersperses scenes of the natural world throughout the narrative. You can criticize it for being all showy style. The depiction of Vronsky doesn't quite work (he seems like a Nutcracker toy soldier rather than a seductive masculine cavalry officer). And there is the problem of compressing a huge complex and wonderful novel into a movie slightly more than two hours. So, I don't feel the same hot connection with the characters, as I do in the novel. Yet, it's a great showy style! I loved the flashes of humor in the philanderer Stiva, Karenin's cold determination to maintain his dignity, Levin's befuddlement, Anna's jealousy toward the end. Yes, it's all accentuated by the style of the movie -- we jump from one fragment to the next -- but I think Wright has chosen the fragments well. The heart of the novel -- a young socialite woman who wants to live and is willing to abandon a life of virtue, and the consequences of that decision -- is there. Anna is played by Keira Knightly. I don't have much to compare her to, as Anna Karenina. She is good in the role, though the style of the movie is not a vehicle for expressing a range of subtle emotions and expressions.