12

A Russian jury meets in a school gym to decide the fate of a teenager accused of murder. Director Nikita Mikhalkov and co-writers Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novototsky freely adapt Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, turning it into a ponderous metaphor for modern Russia, including references to the war in Chechnya and pervasive Russian anti-Semitism. Acting is earnestly effective (Mikhalkov himself plays one of the jurors), but the movie is at least an hour too long and undermined by its own talkativeness: Subtitles are often hard to read, and even when they’re not, the windy monologues are hard to follow and don’t enlighten the jurors’ thought processes (maybe it all makes more sense in Russian). Mikhalkov’s experiment in transplanting the story is more interesting in concept than it is in execution.