Joe Wright’s upcoming adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is certainly one of the many British films to be looking forward to this year. Oscar-winning writer Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Brazil) has penned the script, and the cast is led by the fantastic Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Johnson, and Matthew Macfadyen.

Focus Features have now released four beautiful new images from the film, giving us a wonderful look at Knightley, Law, and Johnson in the film due out later this year.

“The third collaboration of Academy Award nominee Keira Knightley with director Joe Wright, following the award-winning box office successes “Pride & Prejudice” and “Atonement,” is the epic love story “Anna Karenina,” adapted from Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel by Academy Award winner Tom Stoppard (“Shakespeare in Love”). The story unfolds in its original late-19th-century Russia high-society setting and powerfully explores the capacity for love that surges through the human heart, from the passion between adulterers to the bond between a mother and her children. As Anna (Ms. Knightley) questions her happiness, change comes to her family, friends, and community.”

Knightley has of course been the lead in two of Wright’s earlier films, Atonement and Pride & Prejudice, the latter earning Knightley her Best Actress Oscar nomination.

The supporting cast is equally fantastic, full of terrific British talent, including the likes of Olivia Williams, Kelly Macdonald, Emily Watson, Ruth Wilson, and Holliday Grainger.

Last month, The Playlist reported that Wright promised an experimental approach to the making of the film that sounds like it could translate brilliantly on screen,

“shoot[ing] the majority of his Russian epic on and around a single location, a run-down theater built from scratch at Shepperton Studios  outside London.

Inspired by his idea that the book is “about the search for the authentic life,” the film will see the world of Anna, her husband Karenin and her lover Count Vronsky intrude on this theatrical setting, with full-size trains running through one moment and the “stage” converted into an ice rink the next.”

Anna Karenina will be released here in the UK on 7th September, and though it hasn’t secured a US release date yet, it’s no doubt just a matter of time. Given that his two collaborations with Knightley have both gone to the Oscars in recent years, it will be interesting to see if Anna Karenina will be there this time next year. Of course, that’s jumping ahead of ourselves, but it certainly wouldn’t be surprising, and these new images are an excellent indication of the beauty we can look forward to in the project in a few months’ time. As usual, you can click to enlarge.