The Water Diviner

Russell Crowe makes a sure-footed if unadventurous debut as director with this tale of a father in search of the bodies of his three sons, all of whom were lost during the bloody and futile Battle of Gallipoli during the First World War. After the death of his wife, Australian farmer and water diviner Joshua Connor (Crowe) travels to Turkey, intending to use his skills to locate the bodies, much to the opposition of the British army, in the lazily clichéd form of heartless bureaucrat Captain Brindley (Dan Wyllie). However, Connor meets Turkish officer Major Hasan (the excellent Yilmaz Erdogan), who becomes an unlikely ally. He also befriends his hotel owner, grieving Muslim widow Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), although the relationship has the potential to blossom into an affair, with all the attendant cultural complications. Crowe has the good sense to surround himself with top-drawer technical talent: the cinematography by Andrew Lesnie (The Lord of the Rings) is positively luminous, and David Hirschfelder's score is haunting and subtle. Moving though it sometimes is, the film takes few risks, while the sudden hairpin-turn into Hollywood happy-ending territory undoes more than a little of what's gone before.