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Somewhere between the 40- and 60-minute marks of Nikita Mikhalkov's "12," a sparrow flies through a window into the school gymnasium that's serving as an ad hoc jury room for a supposedly routine Moscow homicide case. This is unusual for one or two reasons, the most obvious of which is that it's the dead of winter. (The window isn't open, mind you; it's broken, as is forcefully pointed out by one juror who sees the gym's sorry shape as emblematic of "40 years of running in place.") This ups the ante for what's already shaping up to be an overstuffed socially conscious allegory with its roots in the American, um, classic "12 Angry Men." "This is it," this viewer thought, a trifle giddily, remembering an old song by King Missile; "this is mystical shit."

Because, really, if you're going to make a self-aggrandizing quasi-allegorical modern epic (160 minutes!) about the state of contemporary Russia,...