Tarr’s audiences into those who hail him as a director of “visionary genius” and those for whom he is a “crashing bore”.
The New York Times reviewer Nathan Lee described The Man from London as “bloated, formalist art”, and an “outrageously stylized, conceptually demanding film” that dehumanizes and alienates its audience. In The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt complimented the intricacy of the cinematography and the monochrome photography, but judged the film to be “tedious”, “repetitive” and “nearly unwatchable”. In a review of Cannes’ offerings for Time Out, Dave Calhoun too drew attention to the meticulous cinematography and signature shot length’s of Tarr’s “austere and mesmeric” film, and declared Swinton’s dubbing into Hungarian one of the festival’s strangest instances of cultural displacement. Reporting from Cannes, The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described the