alt="[Anna Karenina]" align=right width=160 height=225 hspace=15 vspace=5> To paraphrase Tolstoy yet again, good movie adaptations of literary classics are all different, bad ones are all wearyingly the same. You can tell the latter type right away; they usually have the original author's name in the title in a desperate attempt to prove they're authentic. Bernard Rose's Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is respectful, inert, and unnecessary. Unfolding like a pack of postcards of Imperial Russia backed by the strains of Tchaikovsky, this Anna forgoes passion, guilt, and tragedy for chandeliers, gilt mirrors, and silky pastoral landscapes. As the high-society wife and mother whose adultery sets her up for a one-way train ride, Sophie Marceau (Braveheart) is no Greta Garbo. Earnest and gamine-eyed, she's more like Anna's jealous younger sister.

Neither is Sean Bean as Anna's lover Vronsky likely to raise pulsebeats. Which leaves the film open for James Fox's subtle, smarmy, sad Karenin and Alfred Molina's idealistic landowner Levin. The detached observer of Anna's downfall and her spiritual counterpart, Levin is Tolstoy's persona in the novel. By the end of the film he literally becomes the author, but neither that nor sticking Leo's name on the title is going to make this film anything Tolstoy would recognize. At the Kendall Square and in the suburbs.