GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs | SportsGamer MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

xx All of Us
53 Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
57 Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, The
64 Appaloosa
69 Ashes of Time Redux
68 August Evening
xx B.O.H.I.C.A.
62 Baghead
84 Ballast
54 Battle in Seattle
xx Beer for My Horses
75 Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
xx Billy: The Early Years
66 Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
56 Bottle Shock
55 Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
50 Breakfast with Scot
61 Brick Lane
43 Call and Response
62 Changeling
49 Children of Huang Shi, The
47 Choke
46 Choose Connor
84 Christmas Tale, A
41 Cthulhu
81 Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
xx Dostana
62 Duchess, The
46 Dukes, The
63 Eden
xx Eden Lake
66 Elegy
46 Elephant King, The
80 Encounters at the End of the World
26 Everybody Wants to Be Italian
64 Fall, The
69 Fear(s) of the Dark
26 Filth and Wisdom
28 Fireproof
52 First Basket, The
67 Flow: For Love of Water
37 Forever Strong
69 Frontrunners
82 Frozen River
43 Gardens of the Night
73 Girl Cut in Two, A
73 Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
54 Good Dick
30 Guitar, The
84 Happy-Go-Lucky
44 Henry Poole is Here
31 Hounddog
27 House of the Sleeping Beauties
47 How About You
54 Humboldt County
72 I Served the King of England
70 I.O.U.S. A
40 Igor
64 In Search of a Midnight Kiss
78 I've Loved You So Long
63 JCVD
41 Johnny Got His Gun
xx Just Buried
62 Kabluey
63 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
25 Lake City
78 Last Mistress, The
81 Let the Right One In
xx Lower Learning
63 Man Named Pearl, A
89 Man on Wire
xx Mary
xx Matador, The
62 Mister Foe
84 Momma's Man
51 Morning Light
79 Moving Midway
33 My Name Is Bruce
59 Nights and Weekends
73 Obscene
40 Other End of the Line, The
34 Otto; or Up with Dead People
40 Passengers
xx Phoebe in Wonderland
55 Ping Pong Playa
75 Pool, The
77 Pray the Devil Back to Hell
82 Rachel Getting Married
56 Religulous
32 Repo! The Genetic Opera
xx Roadside Romeo
53 RocknRolla
56 Save Me
74 Secret, A
45 Shoot on Sight
57 Sixty Six
85 Slumdog Millionaire
56 Special
58 Splinter
79 Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
67 Synecdoche, New York
82 Tell No One
64 Thousand Years of Good Prayers, A
57 Towelhead
72 Transsiberian
83 Trouble the Water
43 Tru Loved
83 U2 3D
61 Universe of Keith Haring
84 Up the Yangtze
52 Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
79 Visitor, The
61 Wackness, The
59 We Are Wizards
55 What Just Happened?
66 When Did You Last See Your Father?

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Water
Fox Searchlight Pictures

Water reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 77 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
6.7 out of 10
based on 25 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 19 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Waheeda Rehman, Raghuvir Yadav, Vinay Pathak, Rishma Malik, and John Abraham

Set in 1938 Colonial India, against Mahatma Gandhi's rise to power, Water begins when 8-year-old Chuyia is widowed and sent to a home where Hindu widows must live in penitence. (Fox Searchlight)


GENRE(S): Drama  |  Foreign  |  Musical  |  Mystery  |  Romance  
WRITTEN BY: Deepa Mehta  
DIRECTED BY: Deepa Mehta  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: August 29, 2006 
Theatrical: April 28, 2006 
RUNNING TIME: 117 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: Canada / India 
LANGUAGE(S): Hindi (with English subtitles) 

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Village Voice Bill Gallo
This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom.
Read Full Review
100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
A film with the epic scale and fearless common-sense vision of Water is a revelation.
Read Full Review
100
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Profound, passionate and overflowing with incomparable beauty, Water, like the prior two films in director Deepa Mehta's "Elements" trilogy, celebrates the lives of women who resist marginalization by Indian society.
Read Full Review
90
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.
Read Full Review
90
Variety Eddie Cockrell
Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.
Read Full Review
90
The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis
An exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
Read Full Review
90
Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Water, set in 1930s India, is something pretty rare in the world of movies: an artistic muckraker. It is superb and strange at once, a discreet and self-disciplined attack dog of a movie.
Read Full Review
88
Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.
Read Full Review
80
Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
As beautiful as it is harrowing.
Read Full Review
80
LA Weekly David Chute
Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
Read Full Review
78
Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Mehta and her cameraman Giles Nuttgens capture the area's rich interplay of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty.
Read Full Review
75
Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
In an elemental way, though, the film always works. The acting can be basic, a cross between Bollywood directness and Western nuance, but it has weight.
Read Full Review
75
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Lurking just beneath Water's serene, storybook surface is an unmissable, defiant passion.
Read Full Review
75
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The stunning Lisa Ray, a Bollywood exile, makes one of the most beautiful widows ever to grace the screen. Vidula Javalgekar gives a memorable turn as the infirm "Auntie." But the real find is Sarala, a Sri Lankan girl who memorized dialogue in a language she does not understand and delivers it with conviction.
Read Full Review
75
San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
Mehta has created the perfect guide to this strange female world.
Read Full Review
75
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
As a sign of how stubborn some irrational religious traditions can be, Hindu protesters forced Mehta to close down her Indian location and finish the film in neighboring Sri Lanka.
Read Full Review
75
USA Today Claudia Puig
A haunting and disturbing film, set in 1938, about "widow houses." Though occasionally overwrought, it emerges as life-affirming.
Read Full Review
75
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The best elements of Water involve the young girl and the experiences seen through her eyes. I would have been content if the entire film had been her story.
Read Full Review
75
Boston Globe Louise Kennedy
Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.
Read Full Review
70
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.
Read Full Review
67
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.
Read Full Review
63
New York Post Kyle Smith
Gandhi did save India from the British, but he didn't save India from the Indians, and the horrific subjugation of widows continues there even today. It was only 10 years ago that Mehta encountered the Hindu widow who inspired her film.
Read Full Review
60
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.
58
The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.
Read Full Review
50
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 19 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Ri K. gave it a5:
Attempts at creating an emotionally manipulative film were transparent. With a story that should have put a knot in my throat, I was left with only a sense of disgust with how the film was (unfittingly) made to look "beautiful". It's a very sad state of affairs when a formulaic quasi art film like this is the kind that gets P&A dollars to somehow break through, while there are so many genius American indies that we never get to see on the big screen, not to mention all the great foreign films that don't have to resort to cheesy love stories and "stylish" trick cinematography. It's even sadder that this film has received such a high meta score - is what is screened in American theaters these days so bad that "Water" is really so refreshing??? I believe this film is a crime to cinema. A ridiculous waste of gobs of money (production and marketing) only to ruin a truly interesting subject matter & potentially amazing story.

Prudence K. gave it a10:
Easily the funniest and saddest films of the year! I don't know. Sometimes I didn't know what was going on, I am fluent in Hindi though... so that was cool! I thought it was good when they cut her hair, it was so sad! I cried at that part. Oh! And I loved when they played with the dog, that was so cute! But it was mean when they cut her hair. But that lady was so mean! She was big! And she was obsessed with that bird! It was so weird! Cool film!

Barbara K. gave it a2:
Tragedy as a perfume commercial.

Miss Anonymous gave it an8:
I thought the movie was beautiful. It's ashame that it was banned in India. My relatives over there do not get to see it yet even though they are upper-middle class educated Indians I see all the time the ancient prejudice against women still existing - not to the extent of the story but it's still there.

Jim G. gave it a6:
This is the first movie where the depth of emotion conveyed left me thinking there were at least four lead characters. So many characters, so well developed. Though I know people want to make this a one-issue movie, I found it effective in simply telling the story of the individual characters, showing us the truths of their lives even if we don't know all the events that preceded or anything that follows.

Mike T. gave it a4:
I agree with Rahul -- very well stated! -- and with Tasha Robinson of the Onion. The movie was overly gorgeous, looking more like a TV commercial than a believable film story. And the surface beauty actually detracted from the important anti-religion message.

Rahul K. gave it a5:
A somewhat perplexing and maddening movie that doesn't really deliver on the promises suggested by the advertising. Yes, the scenery and settings are evocative, and create a strong image of a time and place, but the plot is meandering and plodding, and drags much more than necessary. Compounding this problem-- or perhaps causing it-- the characters are not easy to relate to. They are like one-dimensional cookie-cutter fillers that fail to pull you into the plot enough to send a clear and powerful message, which is unfortunate because this is primarily a political story of social inequality; and while it gets the point across about the treatment of widows in India, it really struggles at making the point stick because the characters are the kind that dissolve from memory moments after the film ends. Furthermore, the use of a white woman as the female lead and an Anglicized Indian guy as the male lead seems dishonest in the context of the film, a naked attempt to market the film to a Western audience that left a bad taste in my mouth. Another facet of the film that is irksome is the film's poster, which brags about how "religious extremists" tried to obstruct production of the movie and kill the director. This creates the illusion that this movie is going to be revelatory or shocking or a monumental historical event, but this is not really the case. The claims may be true, but they are not accurate indicators of the content of the movie; you could easily watch through the whole film and not think twice about anything you saw, much less consider it a matter of serious controversy (unless you are already familiar with the moral codes of fundamentalist Hindus). Of all the scenes, the final is by far the most emotionally demanding, but it seems tacked-on and manipulative rather than poignant and meaningful. "Water" is a cinematic curiosity, certainly, if only for the insight into another time and place, but in most other aspects, it is a forgettable movie packaged in "exotic-foreign-movie" marketing and nice scenery. 2/5

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: MLB | Spore | iPhone 3G | Paris Hilton | Antivirus Software | GPS | Recipes | Shwayze | NFL

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2008 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use