The Water Diviner

An Australian farmer in 1919 (Russell Crowe, who also directed) travels to Turkey to retrieve the remains of his three sons, lost in the Gallipoli campaign of World War I. Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios' script is a mix of epic events and intimate emotions, with battle scenes as indelible as anything since Saving Private Ryan. The movie deftly juggles time and place, and it might have flummoxed a fledgling director like Crowe, but he drives the proceedings with confidence, never letting the scenery or exotic locations upstage the characters—which include a grieving Turkish widow (Olga Kurylenko, exquisite), her young son (Dylan Georgiades, engaging) and a Turkish army officer (Yilmaz Erdogan, dignified). It's an old-fashioned movie in the best sense, beautifully photographed by Andrew Lesnie. J.L.