Anna

2019 Directed by Luc Besson

Never make the weapon the target

Beneath Anna Poliatova's striking beauty lies a secret that will unleash her indelible strength and skill to become one of the world's most feared government assassins.

Sasha Luss Helen Mirren Luke Evans Cillian Murphy Lera Abova Alexander Petrov Nikita Pavlenko Anna Krippa Aleksey Maslodudov Eric Godon Ivan Franěk Jean-Baptiste Puech Adrian Can Alison Wheeler Andrew Howard Jan Oliver Schroeder Louise Parker Sasha Beliaeva Greta Varlese Lauren de Graaf Mikhail Safronov Maria Luss Sergey Bachurskiy Ernest Gromov Sergey Zharkov Eduard Flerov Julia Munrow Jess Liaudin Christopher Craig Show All…

Alternative Titles

アナ, 安娜, Anna: Professional Killer

thriller action

119 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by davidehrlich ★★ 16

Luc Besson’s lifelong obsession with female empowerment has always been hard to square with his lifelong hobby of female objectification. The stylish French auteur and film mogul responsible for the likes of “Lucy,” “The Professional,” and at least nine alleged instances of sexual impropriety loves to build movies around blank women — usually fashion models — who can be reformatted with the power of his own design and costumed with the scant agency he’s afforded them.
In “Anna,” a competent spy thriller that would feel anonymous if not for its slinky bodies and recognizable psychosexual undercurrents, Besson’s signature tendency is expressed with the same literalness that it was in “The Fifth Element” and “La Femme Nikita.” Why start being subtle…
Review by maria ★★½ 8

anna (2019) aka the walmart version of john wick
Review by Jud Stein ★½ 12

Atomic Bland
Review by matt lynch ★★ 2

Besson apparently saw ATOMIC BLONDE and figured he had a fiduciary duty to Europacorp shareholders to rip it off. Anyway this is a virtual remake of NIKITA perked up a little bit with a really wearisome time-shifting structure, complete with constant dipshit references to matryoshka dolls. Is this worth sitting through for the one very good action sequence about 40 minutes in? I dunno, but it's not worth sitting through for the really gross surface-level female empowerment stuff coming from a guy who knocked up a 15-year-old girl he met when she was 12.
Review by supercharli

I'm just here to fuck cillian murphy
Review by riley 🥶 1

1985
FIVE YEARS LATER
3 YEARS EARLIER
2 YEARS LATER
MOSCOW ONE YEAR LATER
PARIS
1 YEAR EARLIER
NEW YORK
1 YEAR LATER
Review by Mr. Like ★★½ 2

Rotten Tomatoes: 36%
Metacritic Metascore: 40
IMDB: 6.6
52/100
Release Date: 21 June 2019
Distributor: Summit Entertainment
Budget: $35M
Worldwide Gross: $31.3M
Amazon - Ranked
2019 Ranked
Olga: "Trouble never sends a warning."
SYNOPSIS: Beneath Anna Poliatova's (Sasha Luss') striking beauty lies a secret that will unleash her indelible strength and skill to become one of the world's most feared government assassins.
It's clear that the Charlize Theron 2017 smash hit, "Atomic Blonde", has set a new precedent for the female action hero subgenre with Red Sparrow and now Anna being released in consecutive years. While Anna doesn't cross Atomic Blonde's threshold, it's still a serviceable action flick that definitely surpassed my high expectations of "Red Sparrow".
And yes, it's…
Review by Hatercles 1

LUC BESSON: Oh-ho, the Americans, they have no taste for originality. It’s sequel this, reboot that.
FRENCH CRITIC: Yes, Hollywood runs around like headless chickens, throwing everything they can into audiences’ faces, “you loved this before, you will love it again, no?”
LUC BESSON: Exactly. We French invented the motion picture, and it is we who shall shepherd it through this dark time. My new film breaks new ground, offering something never seen before. It is about this woman. She’s quite beautiful, yes.
FRENCH CRITIC: Oooh, I am intrigued already.
LUC BESSON: But in addition, she is an assassin.
FRENCH CRITIC: An assassin? Even though she is a beautiful woman?
LUC BESSON: Yes, yes, it is hard to imagine, but…
Review by oppie ★½ 2

im here for cillian murphy and cillian murphy only
Review by donnia ★★★½

I would join the KGB too if it meant I got to fuck Cillian Murphy AND Luke Evans
Review by Ryne Walley ★ 11

Atomic Blonde ran so that Red Sparrow could walk and Anna could fall.
A film of such shoddy, amateurish quality whose creative I doubt even bothered to consider the audience's ability to see right past his smug veil of empty empowerment and right to the flick's core of lazy exploitation and blatant objectification. Anna (or ANИA) is a conceited power fantasy of the lowest order that fails to disguise its utterly shallow nature under a faulty veneer of unfortunately mishandled reality. The entire experience is like a used piece of gum glued to the sole of your shoe; it sticks for all of the wrong reasons.
Writer/director Luc Besson is a fading artist of seriously questionable moral character whose worst…
Review by Joe

I'm sorry for seeing this and I'm very sorry for enjoying it this much, Besson is one of the top French creeps in history and probably belongs in prison, the whole thematic structure here is about a woman freeing herself from various layers of masculine domination but in the classic tradition of exploitation movies since forever that's mostly a pretext for some lurid sex, violence, and Helen Mirren channeling Burgess Meredith. There's a scene towards the end in which Anna explains her lifelong plight of never having any freedom to make her own decisions in life, and she mentions being (paraphrasing) "a KGB assassin, a CIA counterspy, a model..." and it occurred to me that this seemed more like a…

Recent reviews

Review by dolores ★½

it's red sparrow but with a bad lead actress
Review by Laura María de los Ángeles ★★

La versión de Atomic Blonde (2017) de Luc Besson, sin llegar a ser lo suficientemente propositiva o arriesgada.
Las secuencias de acción son entretenidas y emocionantes; sin embargo, se dejan opacar por los innecesarios saltos temporales, un intento apresurado de querer sorprender al espectador y una protagonista sin la fuerza suficiente para encarnar a una femme fatale. En mi opinión, Helen Mirren es la única que destaca, más por su fuerte presencia escénica que por otra cosa.
Bonus: Luke Evans sigue siendo mi amor platónico después de diez años.
Review by Uros Djosic ★★½

A mediocre movie that tells a story with the similar feel to the one of Red Sparrow. Didn't find the way of storytelling trough time jumps amusing but liked the ending.
Review by Sonny Bunch ★★½

As someone who quite enjoys Luc Besson's whole vibe and really loves the whole subgenre of "attractive actresses killing loads of people for [insert reason here]," I wanted to like this a lot more than I did. The nesting-doll-style storytelling — where we see a thing happen and then rewind to a point in the past to see WHY it happened — is overly complicated and eventually aggressively annoying. After the fourth or fifth flashback I was just like "CHRIST WE GET IT." At that point you're not really keeping people on their toes so much as being like "Hey, jerks, bet you couldn't guess why THIS is happening." And it's like "no, obviously we can't, you're telling the story and if you withhold the information obviously we won't know about it. Obviously. You're not clever you're just kind of a dick."
Anyway.
Review by Maria Valinoti

I’m here for Cillian and Luke, together if possible...
Review by jeany carla ★★★★

ANNA GIRL U LOOK LIKE MY FRIEND
Review by Leah Crocker ★★★½

why: luc besson
i liked the story. The action was good.
Review by Sam Entwistle ★★½

some good action???
Review by Omar Awad ½

Put Atomic Blonde and every russian stereotype you can find into a blender and you get this movie. Well maybe.. I rarely felt more frustrated watching a movie just waiting for it to end. It’s a shame that Helen Mirren is a part of this.
Review by Tigerschulze ★★★★

Anna ist der neue Film von Luc Besson, der auch "Leon: Der Profi" oder "Lucy" gemacht hat. Anna jedoch erinnerte mich Teils stark an "Red Sparrow" mit Jennifer Lawrence. Wieder ist da eine Powerfrau die viel Verderben bringt.
Für mich war "Anna" jedoch ein gelungener Spionage-Thriller, der sehr unterhaltsam und spannend ist. Die schauspielerische Leistung war ok. Der eigentliche Star des Films war für mich die verwinkelte und Twist reiche Handlung, die in Vergangenheits-Sequenzen erzählt wird. Für mich war es einer der ersten Spionage-Thriller bei der es in der Handlung nicht darum geht eine Katastrophe zu verhindern. In erster Linie geht es um Anna und was sie alles erlebt und erreicht hat im Leben. Auf der anderen Seite geht es…
Review by Nicolaj Skov Nielsen ★★

Not a huge fan of this one. The constant time jumps was really distracting and I just couldn't get onboard with the use of early 2000's phones, laptops and even flash drives in a movie set around 1990. Will give it credit for the action scenes as the were honestly pretty okay.
Review by Paul G. ★★★

I enjoyed this take from Besson on a KGB femme fatale. Decent action sequences, and a few twists throughout. I appreciate the editing and how we are kept in the dark until AFTER Anna does something, then having it flash back to explain how it happened.