If you can keep in mind that the whole thing is an Australian tweak of the magic carpet story from The Arabian Nights (boy travels the world and has many adventures before returning home to his father), you can probably enjoy this improbable, episodic, and earnestly entertaining Russell Crowe story about a dad who goes looking for his boys when they don’t come home from the war. Of course, it can be hard to keep bedtime stories in mind when you open on a grief-crazed mother savaging her husband (“You can find water, but you can’t find your own children!”) and drowning herself, and then proceed to the skeleton-studded hills of Gallipoli. Also when the score keeps bumbling through its every appearance. But if Crowe is clearly a neophyte director with a shaky grip on both light and sound, he is even more clearly a seasoned actor, and he gets good help from Yilmaz Erdogan as a weary, bighearted Turkish officer. (2015) — Matthew Lickona