| 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.
|
| 100 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
A film with the epic scale and fearless common-sense vision of Water is a revelation.
|
| 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.
|
| 90 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Exquisite storytelling, acting and visuals.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
As beautiful as it is harrowing.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
David Chute
Hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
Lurking just beneath Water's serene, storybook surface is an unmissable, defiant passion.
|
| 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.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
Mehta has created the perfect guide to this strange female world.
|
| 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.
|
| 75 |
USA Today
Claudia Puig
A haunting and disturbing film, set in 1938, about "widow houses." Though occasionally overwrought, it emerges as life-affirming.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
A potent feminist protest--all the more so because some of the laws depicted are still in force today.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 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.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.
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