This film observes Russian teenage boys who have been sent to a locked reform school for a range of crimes, from the petty to the heinous. “They’re animals, not children,” we hear, and yet they are made endearing and frankly beautiful under the filmmaker’s inquiring gaze, bringing to mind characters from Charles Dickens’s nineteenth-century London. As the film takes us into the minutiae of their daily lives and gives us a haunting sense of their past and future, it suggests there might be good reason for these boys to prefer the regimented routine of their confinement to the anarchy of the homes they left behind.  NK