Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Brilliant and touching

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

well to start i was definitely attracted to the lead actress .lurdes , if i actually remember .the scene in which she finds a man with a green lizard in his hand in the night ,i thought it could be a thriller .but i later understood it was a very different movie from those i had watched before .i didn't her language it was Spanish .i read the subtitles,the schoolteacher was also the character resulted from emotional acting an skillful direction .it was fully clear ,the character she was portraying ;the way she scolds Ismael,adores Esteban;talks,sings,smokes with Manuel .exelent.well though i watched the whole movie i could finally get a meaning of the whole picture though i got a conclusion .it was a understand yourself movie . unlike other movies like terminator.i got attached to the movie,the characters,and Obaba. I would really like to thank the director for such an exceptional piece art as an audience.thank you.

Although this starts out promisingly, a woman in a car is weaving around dark roads in the middle of the night in the middle of the forest until she almost hits a man holding a lizard! This gave me the impression that we were going to see something special, something almost David Lynchian (if there is such a term), but unfortunately, the film starts to go everyplace, not having a core center, just sort of meandering story about a woman trying to solve a mystery of a small town. The character study goes all over the place, and I couldn't really care for any of the characters it seems, especially when some of the story all of a sudden goes into flashback mode. I had some hopes for this movie, but all in all, it was a bit of a letdown.

This is a beautiful film, evocative of life in a rural Basque village, based on the book Obabakoak, by Bernardo Atxaga. It is a fine film, rich in symbolism.The audience was quite involved and interested. This was in Bilbao, and the film was dubbed into Euskera (Basque) with no subtitles.It's vitally important to do more films in threatened languages such as Euskera. Atanarjuat was made in Inuktitut, Hedd Wyn in Welsh. Both were a success both critically and popularly. Since Atxaga is the author who has put Basque literature on the map, his film should and could have been made in Basque.

With great expectations I went to see this film, Spain's contribution to the Oscar-race this year. Part from being completely pointless, banal, pathetic, badly written, edited, acted and directed, the movie is too long. It fails in delivering the "message" it tries to give, fails in its storytelling, clumsy historical settings and above all in its rhythm. There are some so extreme misfires I haven't seen in a movie in a long time (the story of Lucas whose dead sister lives in his head, the divine revelations, all that lizard nonsense). The Spanish-speaking audience around me was yawning and rapidly losing patience, and some of the commentaries I overheard was whether the members of the Spanish Academy had taken drugs before choosing the film for the Oscar contest.