On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. “Oh, yes,” came the reply, “but he was provoked.” That’s pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made “Mongol,” a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year) movie that opens in the city today and depicts the [...]