”Waterland” is one more British feature that seems to have been shaped more by the demands of international marketing than any artistic impulse. It combines a best-selling British novel (Graham ...

Nobody unravels like Jeremy Irons.He doesn’t just wilt or fade or become slightly woozy and call out for the vapors; no, he deconstructs with the rueful inevitability of the collapse of the empire.

Tom Crick, the middle-aged high school history teacher in “Waterland,” drifts haplessly in and out of recollections of his traumatic childhood in England’s Fens, the mysterious marshlands that meet ...