Most critics admire Olmi’s film, and the praise gathers around the same quality: the patience with which it accumulates small details of peasant life until they carry real emotional weight. Reviews describe it as humanist and unsentimental, hopeful without denying hardship, and they credit the non-professional cast, the costumes, the dialect and the locations for making the period feel lived in rather than staged. Slant, reviewing the restoration, singles out the recovered colour and depth of field in the outdoor scenes.
The reservations are slight. Sight and Sound finds occasional sentimentality and a few misjudged effects in a film it otherwise calls tranquil and restrained, and more than one critic warns that the emotional power arrives slowly. Beyond that the spread is narrow. The mixed count owes more to older notices from the New York Times, the New Yorker and Roger Ebert, whose full verdicts we could not read, than to any genuine dissent; nobody who has written about it at length has written it off.