The Thief, Russia's contribution to a mediocre list of nominees for last year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, can be read as a bleak post-WWII family drama or as a political allegory lamenting the harsh patriarchy of Stalinism. On either level, it's an obvious, dramatically inert disappointment. The story is told through the penetrating blue eyes of 6-year-old Misha Philipchuk, a precocious, sensitive boy whose father was killed in the war before he was born. On a crowded train ride, his mother (Yekaterina Rednikova) falls for a dashing young army officer, Vladimir Mashkov, and the three form a makeshift family. Mashkov turns out to be a troubling role model for Philipchuk; he's a petty thief and con artist who inspires loyalty even as he continually rewards it with betrayal. Were it not burdened by such heavy metaphorical baggage—the strong-armed, deceitful father figure literally claims to be Stalin's son—The Thief might have worked as a child's-eye survey of inherited hardships, like a Russian counterpart to Steven Soderbergh's evocative Depression-era memoir King Of The Hill. But despite some attractively muted images and Mashkov's charismatic performance, writer-director Pavel Chukhrai can never quite shoehorn his maudlin, conventional story into anything of greater significance.