In a 12.27 “Top Ten Worst movies of 2012” piece, Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet has called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina a “dud.” No, it isn’t. It’s a brave and visionary film (in my view the bravest film of the year) that people with Brevet’s sensibility have, to their profound shame and discredit, tried to characterize as some kind of dud embarassment with a litany of flip, snarky comments.

There should be laws and prosecutions and penalties for this kind of thing, I swear to God.

Anna Karenina is in no way, shape or form a shortfaller. The shortfallers, trust me, are the critics. It’s a “serious, drop-your-socks knockout — the first truly breathtaking high-style film of the year, a non-musical successor to Moulin Rouge and a disciple of the great ’70s films of Ken Russell (and by that I mean pre-Mahler Russell, which means The Music Lovers and Women In Love) as well as Powell-Pressburger’s The Red Shoes,” as I wrote on 9.6.12.