I adore a hundred scenes from this film and it captures the rhythms and sorrows of the Italian peasants who no longer owned their own land but were virtual serfs. Till the ending I would have given this10 stars easily. The detailed and loving and closely observed world of the film is a treasure in itself. The color is soft, subtle and dreamy. The no-actors are jaw-droppingly good. (Spoiler alert) Now the classic peasant is if anything resourceful, sparing and wastes nothing. So my credulity goes OUT the window when the father cuts down an entire tree to make one wooden shoe for his son so that his son can go to school AND that tree is one of a very long avenue of venerable, trained and neatly spaced trees belonging to the landowner and that entire landscape of trees is ruined by the destruction of one tree my next thought after the waste of an entire tree is that the peasant is insensitive to the simple harmony of the regularly spaced avenue of trees that is part of his own life as well. I am being kind giving this eight stars out of ten. When a poor peasant and his family are thrown out of their homes and I, in the audience are cheering their departure - the filmmaker has screwed up his message.

I'm Italian and I grown up with the charming stories of my grandparents, about the works in the countryside, the long walks for go to school and to the church, the frugal diet, the attempts of cheat to the bailiff (il fattore) and to the owner (il possidente), the killing of the pigs (la pista, that I saw more times in my childhood), the meeting between young men and women... this movie is a perfect reconstruction of their stories. I have some books too, written by old men and women of my region lived at the beginning of the century, and all the scenes in this masterpiece are written in these books. Some scenes could seems cruel to the eyes of a citizen, and the seven minutes where you can see the killing of the pig would be impossible to make in this century (the animalists would became crazy), but this is history, and make more sweet the history doesn't have sense. This is the history of Italy, history that you can find yet in some part of the peninsula, and watching "L'albero degli zoccoli" can help you in understanding better my country. It isn't an action movie, and if you are looking for sci-fi or action be aware that even a masterpiece like this one could be boring to wrong eyes.

Director Ermanno Olmi's ambition is colossal, and he will settle for nothing less than an epic about the whole spectrum of human existence. The film is unusual in the sense that it rarely focuses on a character or a plot. Yet Olmi threads a unity with mastery unmatched by anything else I've seen before. Also, the background score provides a nice touch. But this is where the good things end for me.The film suffers from an abundance of religious propaganda. The scene where a terminally ill animal recovers miraculously after drinking some sort of holy water really disgusted me. Also, I felt like the film idealizes peasant life to some extent - especially the women. It seems like the only thing the women do is pray. (Of course, the director may have a point here.)I think the lack of a dedicated cinematographer shows. The focus is off in a number of shots, exposure within a scene is not always consistent. There are interior scenes where you can see two or three overlapping shadows of the same person cast by different sources - supposed to be candles. But candles don't cast that kind of hard-edged opaque shadow. I am not sure if it's just me, but the lighting seems really amateur.While the film is beautiful, a work of genius and is a must see for anyone interested in serious filmmaking, beware of the religious stuffs, if you are not into that kind of things.

What is it about artsy directors that makes them love to slaughter live animals on camera? Is it not a "real" film unless you slit a pig's throat (as we see here), shoot a horse in the neck (a la Tarkovsky) or decapitate a water buffalo (Francis Ford Coppola)? I wouldn't mind so much if these films weren't pretentiously laced with "moral" messages and "spirituality". I feel like I'm being preached to by a 17th century Catholic priest. It's utterly sickening. Give me CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST over this hypocrisy any day. At least in CH, you know what you're going to get: animal snuff. Whereas this pretentious tosh is animal snuff packaged like a Buddhist sermon. Yeah, a Buddhist barbecue is more like it. Eat up, folks. The pigmeat is fresh.