Clevercell Very disappointing...

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Howard Schumann Angel (Carmelo Gomez) is a fumigator who visits a wine growing area in order to kill the woodlice that infest the soil and give the wine a distinctively wooden flavor. Tierra, Julio Medem's first film after The Red Squirrel, is a tour de force about a man seeking a balance between his inner world and outer reality. Tierra begins with a trip through space from the outer galaxies descending to Earth in an agricultural area. Beautifully photographed by Javier Aguirresarobe, the bare landscape with its orange and brown colors, gives the land a look of strangeness. Angel has a running dialogue with his other self (his angel). He had been treated in a mental hospital for multiple personality disorder but it is not clear whether he is a spirit guide, an alien visitor, or a paranoid schizophrenic.Angel claims that he has been sent down to Earth for a divine mission, and that he is half-man and half-angel, half-alive and half-dead. Angel hires local gypsies to help him fumigate the land, a project eagerly approved by the town, and they walk through the land covered in white protective suits that look like they were borrowed from the wardrobe of the movie ET. The half of Angel that is alive is torn between the sweet wholesome blond Angela (Emma Suarez) and the over-sexed eighteen-year old redhead Mari (Silke Hornillos Klein). Both are attached to a mean-spirited local farmer named Patricio (Karra Elejalde), one as his neglected wife, the other as his mistress. Angel claims that he is in love with Angela but is slowly seduced by the playfully aggressive Mari. The selection of a lover takes on profound philosophical underpinnings as it becomes a struggle for his soul, reflecting his own split personality, real or imagined. Along the way he has to deal with death by lightning, suicide, wild boar hunts, and a jealous husband. Replete with awkward ruminations about duality, death, and the nature of life, however, the film unfortunately loses its narrative focus and becomes tedious and muddled. Without the metaphysics, Tierra could have been an intriguing look at the nature of human desire and the way we make choices about relationships. While the film contains fine performances and an intriguing sense of magic realism, I found Tierra to be an ultimately unsatisfying experience.

heather1252 After seeing "Sex and Lucia" by writer-director Julio Medem, I decided to rent this film and was gratified with one of the best works of international cinema. From the beginning we are fascinated by the world introduced through the main character, an agricultural technician supposedly recently out of a mental hospital. Along the way we get to doubt most everything. We experience a different world that opens up with unexpected violence and repressed longing. The cinematography, production design and performances are extraordinary until the very end, which as with most Julio Medem films happen to be a commercial cop-out of sorts. In the last two minutes, when it all goes in one direction, the writer-director insists in imposing his (overly sentimental) views on his tormented characters and previously constructed world. Rather than let things go towards their ultimate logical consequences and grand finale, it makes for a silly little ending. Still, a must video rent if you want a thought piece with humor and thriller elements.

jmabel I liked this film a great deal. Medem is a wonderful director, who can take you for more of a ride with plot alone than most other directors can do with special effects: keep your brain in high gear to follow this story.Among other twists, we are left to wonder just how much is Angel's hallucination and how much is really occurring. The only fault I can find with the film is that this is not left even more open: I'd rather not know that there is any particular reason to doubt Angel's sanity.I loved the notion of an exterminator (named Angel, no less) sent to kill off an epidemic of burrowing insects that change the flavor of the local wine, even though he rather likes the altered taste, as do at least some of the locals. I also felt that the theme of a man being drawn carnally to one woman and equally strongly (but less physically) to another, while it has been explored often -- too often -- has seldom been explored better or in a manner more appropriate to the cinema.Settle back with a glass of Rioja and watch it. Maybe twice.

gerardo-5 The film tells the story of a technician who comes to a little village to solve the problem of the local wines, they taste to soil, in that task he will find several charachters that will start to enter wildly in his life. To me this one is the most discret film in the career of Julio Medem, a genial creator. Even if the film follows the general guidelines of the rest of the filmography of Medem (symbolism and psychologicalism), it lacks of the potence to attract so much the audience.