Tolstoy
Anna Karenina, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh review - nimble, sweary staging of Tolstoy's iconic novelSaturday, 20 May 2023
How do you cram a thousand-page novel, a cast of dozens and profound philosophical ponderings on love, fidelity, class and freedom into a two-and-a-half hour stage show? If you’re Lesley Hart – adapter of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at Edinburgh’s... Read more... |
Blu-ray: IvansxtcTuesday, 13 October 2020
“Every cliché about Hollywood is true,” director Bernard Rose remarked in 2018, at the screening Q&A of the restored version of his 1999 Ivansxtc that appears as an extra on this Arrow release – and, post-#MeToo, the film’s satire of that milieu... Read more... |
Russia and the Arts, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 21 March 2016
A good half of the portraits in Russia and the Arts are of figures without whom any conception of 19th century European culture would be incomplete. A felicitous subtitle, “The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky”, provides a natural, even easy point of... Read more... |
War and Peace, Series Finale, BBC OneMonday, 08 February 2016
At the end of Episode Five, Brian Cox's savvy old Field-Marshal Kutuzov gave the order to retreat and abandon Moscow, with hardly a hint of Tolstoy's council of war. That left the final hour and 20 minutes to wrap up the burning of Russia's sacred... Read more... |
War and Peace, BBC OneMonday, 04 January 2016
So, Andrew Davies has bitten off the big one. It may have come as a surprise to some that the master of adapting the British classics for television hadn’t read Tolstoy’s classic-to-end-all-classics until the BBC mooted the idea of a new screen... Read more... |
War and Peace, BBC Radio 4Friday, 02 January 2015
All happy families are alike, Tolstoy declares at the start of Anna Karenina, but this adaptation of War and Peace stresses how the surviving Rostovs and Bolkonskys went through various hells to get to that enviable state. In this one respect... Read more... |
Winter SleepThursday, 20 November 2014
This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep (Kiş Uykusu), is a monumental film. Not merely in its scale – though at 196 minutes, it certainly clocks in on that front – but in its emotional heft. It’s like... Read more... |
DVD: Anna KareninaFriday, 01 February 2013
Joe Wright’s screen adaptation of Tolstoy’s giant of a masterpiece, scripted by Tom Stoppard, takes a big risk that pays off: the many-layered late 19th-century novel is stripped to its bare bones with astonishing brio. He sets most of the story in... Read more... |
10 Questions for Director Bernard RoseFriday, 04 January 2013
Who ever said making a movie was a glamorous business? Shooting the climactic scene of his most recent film Boxing Day, British-born director Bernard Rose (pictured below right) found himself in the freezing Colorado mountains - so cold you couldn’t... Read more... |
Boxing DayTuesday, 18 December 2012
You don’t need to know that Bernard Rose’s Boxing Day is an adaptation of the Tolstoy story Master and Man, but it does help - somewhat. You may well know it anyway, given that it’s the third film in a loose series that Rose started just more than a... Read more... |
Anna Karenina: The RaveThursday, 06 September 2012
A curtain rises at the start of Joe Wright’s thrilling film version of Anna Karenina only for the finish several hours later to be accompanied in time-honoured fashion by the words “the end”. But for all the deliberate theatrical artifice of a movie... Read more... |
Anna Karenina: The PanThursday, 06 September 2012
“You can’t ask why about love,” Aaron Johnson’s Count Vronsky croons tenderly to his beloved, pink lips peeking indecently out through his flasher’s mac of a moustache. Maybe you can’t, but you certainly can ask why you’d take a thousand-page... Read more... |
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