The 1940s. With her husband away fighting Adolf Hitler's Nazis, overworked Isabel Green finds herself caught between a hectic life of tending to the family farm and raising three mutinous children.

Nanny McPhee has all the right storybook ingredients-motherless children, an impending evil stepmother, and magic, courtesy of a fairy-godmotherlike nanny-but it's also got a mischievous dash of ...