Movie reviews: The Water Diviner, While We’re Young, Altman

The Water Diviner. Australia, 1919. Still struggling to come to terms with the death of his three sons at Gallipoli, Connor (Russell Crowe) is devastated when his wife commits suicide.

Determined to find his dead boys and bring them home to be buried alongside their mother, Connor, a water diviner, sets out on the long journey to Turkey.

Once there, however, Connor discovers that Turkey is a country in turmoil, bitterly resentful of the British occupation and still at war with the Greeks. Connor, a man who has lost his faith in God, hasn’t a prayer of finding his sons’ graves … Russell Crowe’s directorial debut is a hugely ambitious piece of work that braids together a number of plot strands, including Connor’s search for his dead sons, his tentative relationship with grieving widow Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko), and his growing respect for the man who commanded the Turkish troops at Gallipoli, Major Hasan (Yilmaz Erdogan).

The backdrop is also complex, as Crowe explores the post-war sentiment of growing Turkish nationalism, all of it filtered through the very human flaws and foibles of impressively compelling characters.

Crowe himself is in terrific form, a taciturn character almost entirely numbed by the deaths of his loved ones, yet single-mindedly focused on defeating his personal demons and achieving a sense of peace, and he gets very strong support from Kurylenko and Erdogan, both of whom contribute fully-fleshed but radically different characters representing the emergence of modern Turkey from the old Ottoman Empire.

The ending is perhaps a little self-indulgent and unnecessarily extended, but otherwise this is by turns a moving, hard-hitting and often poetic account of one man’s harrowing of hell.

While We’re Young (15A) stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as Josh and Cornelia, a married couple who are sauntering into comfortable middle-age.

They’re pleasant, intelligent people — he’s a documentary filmmaker, she’s a producer of her father’s documentaries — even if they are a little bit smug about how neatly arranged their lives are.

Then Josh and Cornelia meet aspiring filmmaker Jamie (Adam Driver), a laidback twenty-something hipster, and Darby, his hippy-chick girlfriend, and realise how fusty their lives have become. Soon Josh and Cornelia are taking Peruvian mescaline, listening to vinyl records and trying desperately to persuade themselves that it’s not too late to be cool.

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg), While We’re Young functions as a kind of double satire, firstly on the kind of middle-aged Americans who refuse to grow up, and secondly on the calculated cynicism masked by the quirky excesses of the hipster generation.

That lends itself to some very funny moments and a number of neatly executed visual gags, but while all the leading players are enjoyable to watch, the story plays out along rather predictable lines.

It all sails along quite merrily, and Baumbach hits all the narrative beats with an offbeat rhythm, but the characters here are very obvious targets for mockery, and there is a sense that Baumbach — who has in the past showcased a superb eye for the truly absurd — has lined up his ducks in too neat a row before taking aim.

Directed by Ron Mann, Altman (PG) is a documentary about the career of one of American cinema’s great filmmaking mavericks, the late Robert Altman.

A host of stars who worked with Altman — including Julianne Moore, Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, Lily Tomlin, James Caan and Elliott Gould — offer very brief cameos in which they try to define ‘Altman-esque’, but otherwise the film is a rich mosaic composed of one-to-one and public interviews with Altman himself, interspersed with scenes from his films and significant amount of home movie and location footage.

The director leaves behind a wonderful legacy, as his films — from MASH (1970) and The Long Goodbye (1973) to The Player (1992), Shortcuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001) — weren’t just movies that subverted the conventional Hollywood playbook, but revolutionised the way in which film-based story communicated with the audience.

He had as many misses as hits, of course, his commercial failures falling victim to a restless and at times self-destructively inventive personality, and the charmingly self-deprecating Altman is never less than fascinating.

If there’s a caveat about this film, it’s that it’s far too short at 96 minutes; then again, even if it were five times as long, it still wouldn’t do full justice to the man’s career and impact on cinema. It’s a gorgeous introduction to anyone coming fresh to his work.