For his screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s operatic novel Anna Karenina, director Joe Wright eschewed ordinary interpretation, opting instead to base the Romanov drama primarily inside a cavernous morphing theater. Candlelit chandeliers descend to suggest a neoclassical ballroom, horses thunder across a stage during a race scene, and paneled walls part so the actors—among them Keira Knightley in the title role—can enter the world at large, strolling through a field of waving wheat or across a wonderland tundra graced by the onion-domed Church of the Transfiguration. Such surrealistic effects steal the show. Opens in theaters November 16