“12”– Revisiting “12 Angry Men”
Academy Award nominee for best foreign film in 2008, “12″ is a Russian interpretation of “12 Angry Men” (1957) starring Henry Fonda and Lee Cobb.
If “Twelve Angry Men” argued for the right to a fair trial in the time of McCarthyism, “12” dramatizes anti-Semitism, anti-immigration, class warfare, and hatred for Chechens. The majority of the jurors are grim middle-aged men who carry the scars of the turbulent history of the Soviet Union. In Moscow, twelve jurors weigh the fate of a Chechen teenager accused of murdering his stepfather, who was a...