The Man from London.

"[I]t is a strange disappointment," finds Ed Gonzalez in the Voice, "that [Béla] Tarr follows up his grandiose Werckmeister Harmonies, a bleak but bold metaphysical idyll to pre-millennium tension, with The Man from London, the almost trifling story of one man's guilt filtered mechanically through a funereal noir prism - a regression of sorts for our most Olympian of film auteurs."

In the L Magazine, Michael Joshua Rowin anticipates that disappointment: "Only two-plus hours and containing a lean noir plot drawn from Georges Simenon's same-titled novel, London's 'minor' status virtually guarantees it won't receive the same kind of love given to prior Tarr. Which is too bad, since it's nothing less than a triumph."

Updated through 9/22.

But for David Fear, writing in Time Out New York, "the movie is a textbook example of what happens when an ill-fitting combination of an author's work and an art-house giant's aesthetic creates nothing but a void."

Earlier: Reviews from last year's festival round: Cannes, Toronto and New York; and Michael Guillén's interview with Tarr in September 07.

At MoMA Monday through September 28.

Update, 9/22: "The movie is really about a manner of looking at things, exploring space in unexpected ways, meditating on qualities of light and the surface of objects," argues Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "It's as an object that The Man From London is best approached.... Mr Tarr's chilly tour de force is to be understood as art all right. Bloated, formalist art."

Posted by dwhudson at September 19, 2008 3:19 PM