Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of 46 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Visually astounding and hands-off in its observation of a family and their environment, Time and Water is an intimate documentary with an epic scope." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 76 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Zachary Lee of RogerEbert.com gave the film three and a half out of four stars and wrote, "Time and Water is very much a project trying to capture memory, time, and history, even as it melts before your eyes. I shudder to think that after the film's premiere at Sundance, what the condition of Iceland's glaciers may look like now." Murtada Elfadl of Variety wrote, "With Time and Water, Dosa turns the climate crisis into something heartbreakingly tangible. She and her collaborators create not just an urgent documentary, but a profoundly beautiful elegy for a world slipping away before our eyes." In a Critics' Pick review for IndieWire, Marya E. Gates noted the film's unique mixture of autobiography and nature doc, calling it "a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery."
