"Waterland" (citywide) is a rarity --a movie about mood and memory that doesn't send you into a stupor. The pull of the past is an almost palpable presence in this film; it overhangs everything like a mist, but the film itself is anything but misty-eyed. Tom Crick (Jeremy Irons), the history professor who unspools his own sorrowful past to his secondary school class, isn't some sentimentalized twit. He's a man in anguish trying to survive his own life by historicizing it. His lingering pauses and measured delivery are the ballast that keep him from flying apart.
Peter Rainer (November 6th, 1992).
"The Past Flows Poetically Through 'Waterland'". Los Angeles Times.