Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: There’s a coldness to the new “Anna Karenina” that has nothing to do with the white stuff piled up along the streets of 19th-century St. Petersburg. It’s the chill that comes from a director entranced with his own talent. Joe Wright has made five feature films now, but only the first, 2005’s “Pride & Prejudice,” felt wholly unstudied and free. The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer’s emotions. Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe. 
  
 It’s also the third Wright movie to star Keira Knightley, an actress who has rewarded him before (in “Pride” and 2007’s “Atonement”) and who does her damnedest to burst through the film’s plate-glass remove. It’s not her fault she doesn’t have the soul of Greta Garbo in the 1935 version of “Anna Karenina” (or an earlier silent adaptation, “Love”). Who does? Knightley’s Anna is a beautiful, shallow songbird, married to a stodgy bureaucrat (Jude Law behind priggish spectacles as Karenin) and flitting through the upper-class whirl of late Imperial Russia as though she owned it, which she does. 
  
 Anna is worldly and chic, but like her bourgeois literary cousin Emma Bovary, she’s naive enough to still believe in romantic love. She resists the seductive come-ons of the young army officer Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) until she doesn’t; then she follows her heart to social ostracism, paranoia, and ruin. Wright, though, understands that Tolstoy was writing about more than one woman’s passion — that the novelist was painting his country and times on an immense canvas — and that Anna’s drama is just the central panel of a vast, teeming triptych. 
  
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 Actually, Wright goes for a different metaphor. His Big Idea is that Anna and her circle inhabit a world so artificial, so cued to outward appearance and behavior, that it could be a theatrical stage. So it is a theatrical stage, with curtains rising to reveal the characters at breakfast and train journeys in front of patently fake backdrops. The walls of the rooms stretch up into the darkness of the lighting grid; the famous horse race clatters across the boards. When characters go “outside,” they mill around with the extras backstage and up in the catwalks. 
  
 It’s a dazzling gambit, filmed with confidence and craft, and it underscores how everyone in this society is looking at and performing for everyone else. (There’s a marvelous shot of Vronsky watching Anna through opera glasses, the lenses glowing with lust.) It also wears out its welcome in about five minutes. Wright fetishizes style at the expense of content — he’s on record as saying naturalism is for sissies, more or less — but the studied perfection of his approach in “Anna Karenina” does nothing but call attention to itself. Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (another tale of a woman punished for breaking the rules) unfolded on an even more minimalist stage set, and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” was an orgy of theatrical excess, but those movies are saved by their sheer inability to say uncle. Their craziness is their risk and reward. Wright’s great curse is that he’s a tasteful revolutionary. 
  
 “Anna Karenina” does well by its outward trappings. Tom Stoppard’s dialogue snaps and snarls (but rarely bites down), the costumes are to die for, and the film as a whole moves along at a decent clip. The performances are pleasing without springing to full-blooded life: Matthew Macfadyen as Anna’s happily hedonistic brother, Kelly Macdonald as his saintly wife, Alicia Vikander (soon to be seen as Queen Caroline of Denmark in “A Royal Affair”) as the virginal Kitty, Olivia Williams a frosty Countess Vronskaya. With his doe eyes and peroxide perm, Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky may be too much the preening boy-toy for some viewers, but it’s an acceptable interpretation. Anna’s infatuation is the teenage crush she never got to have. 
  
 And the film does eventually move out into the actual world, underscoring with heavy hand the honesty — the humble reality — of the aristocrat-farmer Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and his connection to the land. When Kitty leaves St. Petersburg to toil in the fields with the peasants and her new husband, you feel Wright finally relax his grip and let Tolstoy’s dreams of utopia shine through. 
  
 The rest — well, it’s a lavishly produced slog, and it may fool the Motion Picture Academy’s craft branches and audiences taken with posh surfaces, but it won’t fool anyone hoping for what the novel achieves: a portrait of a society with a doomed woman pinned to its center. Knightley is able to capture many aspects of Anna — her kindness, her superficiality, her perceptiveness — but the tragic dimension eludes her. Maybe she’s not yet there as an actress; maybe Wright’s smothering visual brilliance won’t let her get there. When Anna’s “huge and merciless” fate comes rolling along in the final moments, it hits with a sickening force that, ironically, jolts the film to life. 
  
 Too late. In the end, Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is a celebration of its director’s unique gifts and a demonstration of what those gifts can fail to achieve. All great movies are alike, but every unsuccessful one screws up in its own way. ||||| Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones — or let’s just say the average ones, to spare the feelings of hard-working wig makers and dialect coaches — are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris, through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped according to the filmmaker’s will. 
  
 The British director Joe Wright has seemed to me — up to now — to belong to the dreary party of humility. His screen versions of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” are not terrible, just cautious and responsible. For all their technical polish and the admirable discipline of their casts, those films remain trapped in literariness. Instead of strong, risky interpretations, they offer crib notes and the pale flattery of imitation. The proof of their mediocrity is that admirers of Austen or Mr. McEwan will find no reason for complaint. 
  
 Mr. Wright’s “Anna Karenina” is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly — wonderfully — crazy terms. Pious Tolstoyans may knit their brows about the stylistic liberties Mr. Wright and the screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, have taken, but surely Tolstoy can withstand (and may indeed benefit from) their playful, passionate rendering of his masterpiece. 
  
 The challenge of “Anna Karenina” is that Tolstoy’s loose and baggy monster of a novel is more than large, bigger than great: it is comprehensive. As it glides among its many characters, reading their thoughts and dissecting their desires, the book becomes a vivid panorama of an entire society, you might even say a whole species. “Anna Karenina” does not take place, as movie-trailer voice-overs might say, “in a world” of such and such exotic customs. The book lives in the world, in the busy, contingent present tense of mid-19th-century Imperial Russia, which contained everything Tolstoy knew. To try to reproduce that world according to the canons of 21st-century movie realism would be to diminish and falsify his narrative, which ascends through cultural and social detail into a realm of universal emotion. 
  
 Mr. Wright’s brilliant gamble is to arrive at this level of emotional authenticity by way of self-conscious artifice. The cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are rendered as elaborate stage sets. (Sarah Greenwood is the production designer.) Characters make their way around props, past painted backdrops and through catwalks, ropes and backstage rigging. You get the sense that in these bureaucratic offices, ministerial meetings and aristocratic households, everyday life is a form of theater. To play your part in this intricately hierarchical society you must speak your lines, hit your marks, know your place and beware of improvisation. 
  
 But the film itself is the very opposite of stagy. The camera hurtles through the scenery as if in hungry pursuit; the lush colors of the upholstery and the costumes pulsate with feeling; the music (by Dario Marianelli) howls and sighs and the performances are fresh, energetic and alive. Compressing the important events of Tolstoy’s thousand pages into an impressively swift two hours and change, Mr. Wright turns a sweeping epic into a frantic and sublime opera. 
  
 The principal diva is Keira Knightley, her hair dyed black, her cheekbones veiled and her slender frame encased in gowns that function like satin mood rings. We sometimes talk about characters having arcs, but Anna Karenina is more like a human wave tank, rising and falling according to the contradictions of her temperament. The loyal, bored wife of a dry, virtuous government official (played with heartbreaking tact by Jude Law), Anna travels from St. Petersburg to Moscow to calm a marital storm in the household of her brother, Stiva Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), who has been cheating on his wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald). 
  
 Oblonsky’s adultery foreshadows what is perhaps the most famous infidelity in literature, though his philandering is also trivial compared to the affair that Anna will pursue with Count Vronsky, a young military officer. I assume you know that it ends badly, but Mr. Wright’s real interest, like Tolstoy’s, is in everything that happens in between Anna’s first meeting with Vronsky and her final encounter with the wheels of a train. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, with curly blond hair, a crisp white uniform and the kind of mustache that would have melted hearts in an Upper West Side singles bar around 1974, turns Vronsky into a pretty, impulsive enigma. He has the eyes of a poet, but it is hard to shake the suspicion that this would-be romantic hero is, at heart, a shallow hedonist dominated by his imperious mother (Olivia Williams). |||||
Student:
Looking for something a little more brainy than Twilight this weekend? Well, a new adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is also hitting theaters, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley, but critics are divided on the result. Everyone agrees it looks great, but many believe it lacks heart. Here's a taste of what people are saying: "You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train," writes Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle. Wright "made the movie he wanted to make, and he made it well," but he took such pains to distance his audience from the proceedings that we never connect emotionally. "The result is a beautiful disaster." It's a "dazzling but only partly coherent confection," writes Andrew O'Hehir of Salon, who's impressed by "how much of Tolstoy’s spirit they actually pack into the damn thing." Knightley has evolved beyond the "upper-crust ingénue type with a bone structure made for the movie screen" she started her career as; her Anna "is a complicated, powerful, and vulnerable character." Wright's conceit of staging Karenina like a stage play is "a dazzling gambit, filmed with confidence and craft," writes Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. "It also wears out its welcome in about five minutes." The problem is that Wright—who's "on record as saying naturalism is for sissies, more or less"—can't just cut loose like, say, Baz Luhrmann in Moulin Rouge. "He's a tasteful revolutionary." AO Scott at the New York Times thought it was "brilliant," compressing Tolstoy's "loose and baggy monster of a novel" into "a frantic and sublime opera." But even he admits that it lacks "the deep, resonant note of tragedy" that would take it from very good to great. "You may be dazzled … but really, you should feel as if you had been hit by a train."