While Crowe the actor has impressive screen presence and conveys grief with subtlety, Crowe the director errs on the side of caution in this conservatively directed feature, which splutters along...

| Aug 14, 2019

Indeed, this is the 51-year-old Crowe's first time as a movie director, but he's hardly a novice actor stepping behind the camera for some sort of vanity project.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.0 | Apr 26, 2015

It's clear that Russell Crowe has poured his heart and soul into the historical romance The Water Diviner, his first feature as a director. If only the film were better.

| Apr 24, 2015

A sloggy, heartfelt piece of quasi-magical realist storytelling.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 24, 2015

Crowe strives to strike a universal chord about the futility of war. Simplistic? Maybe. But in crafting a film about the pain a parent feels after losing a child in battle, Crowe transcends borders and politics.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2015

Crowe needs, badly, a director to push back against his default mode: The script for The Water Diviner posits that Joshua Connor is the most interesting man in the frame at all times, but Crowe's performance doesn't earn that.

| Apr 24, 2015

To watch "The Water Diviner" it be warned constantly that we must break ourselves of our addiction to imagery that the film we're watching can't seem to resist.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 24, 2015

Water seeks its own level and Crowe, while in over his head, will find his audience.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 24, 2015

The film feels purposeful and true. Good job, mate.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 24, 2015

Despite the incongruous romance and abrupt action beats, Crowe gives a likable, sympathetic performance. But it all starts to dry up before our eyes.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 24, 2015

Before it detours into not one, not two, but at least three preposterous Hollywood twists, "The Water Diviner" is an absorbing drama.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 23, 2015

The awfulness and futility of war are seared onto the screen, in images that are often hard to look at.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 23, 2015

If you can keep in mind that the whole thing is an Australian tweak of the magic carpet story from The Arabian Nights, you can probably enjoy this improbable, episodic, and earnestly entertaining...story.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 23, 2015

You don't have to be a historian to wonder about the timing of the opening or a critic to regret that Mr. Crowe has signed onto a preposterous, would-be sweeping historical romance that's far too slight and silly to carry the weight of real history.

| Apr 23, 2015

While the war story aims for epic turf, the love story settles for manipulation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 23, 2015

Assuming you buy that a noble man of the earth can use his divining skills to locate loved ones in the muddy remains of war, there's plenty else that stretches credibility in Crowe's film.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 23, 2015

It suggests nothing so much as a movie version of a book-club novel that has yet to be written. That doesn't have to be an insult, and it isn't.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 23, 2015

After toiling for the likes of Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, and Peter Weir all these years, Crowe takes command of his own camera crews and castmates, mounting an ambitious and sentimental period drama.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 23, 2015

There's at least one better film on the topic - Gallipoli - but The Water Diviner has its moments, even if its grasp of reality is all wet.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 23, 2015

The film requires a historical complexity that eludes Crowe, who flattens the landscape into bromides on family and country, and the hard-won glories of being Russell Crowe.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 23, 2015