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100Profound, 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.
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100A film with the epic scale and fearless common-sense vision of Water is a revelation.
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100This 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.
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90Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.
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An exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
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90Deftly balancing epic sociopolitical scope with intimate human emotions, all polished to a high technical gloss, Deepa Mehta's Water is a profoundly moving drama.
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90Water, 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.
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88The writer-director doesn't raise her voice, even as she firmly condemns the injustice. Water seduces us with its beauty and sorrow.
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80Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
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80As beautiful as it is harrowing.
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78Mehta and her cameraman Giles Nuttgens capture the area's rich interplay of light and color, land and water, and riches and poverty.
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75The 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.
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75Lurking just beneath Water's serene, storybook surface is an unmissable, defiant passion.
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75As 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.
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75Mehta has created the perfect guide to this strange female world.
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75A haunting and disturbing film, set in 1938, about "widow houses." Though occasionally overwrought, it emerges as life-affirming.
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75Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.
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75The 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.
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75In 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.
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70A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.
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67It's infuriating in more ways than one. Yet it's also somehow touching in its melange of melodrama and modernism.
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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.
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60A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.
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58Water 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.
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50The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 9
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Mixed: 3 out of 9
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Negative: 1 out of 9
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BarbaraK.2Tragedy as a perfume commercial.
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RiK.5
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PrudenceK.10