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 »
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 »
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 »
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
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 »
50
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Owen Gleiberman
The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.Read Full Review »
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