Steinesongo Too many fans seem to be blown away

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

morfax12 Self-indulgent, boring piece of garbage; the worst sin a director can commit. This is the slowest, least interesting attempt at film-making that I have ever seen. I'm sure the co-directors/ "writers" must have sat through the rushes by themselves and patted themselves on the back. I don't see how the other cast and crew could sit with them and keep straight faces. I can't believe there are people who fund this garbage; they must have money to burn. I only wish I'd seen the reviews before paying to rent it. Although I'd be even more upset if I had paid to see it in a theatre. Did I see correctly? Did this garbage actually get some kind of award at Cannes?

Ilpo Hirvonen Bela Tarr is a Hungarian director renowned for his minimalism and extremely long shots. His films have shocked the world - especially the incredible length (7h 15 minutes) of his magnum opus Sátántangó (1994) - with their ambiguity and uniqueness. In his films Tarr combines tragic elements with absurdly comic, but there's never linear dramatic structure. His art is a combination of Tarkovsky's slow, monotonous shots and camera movement, and Bresson's static camera that picks small details for us to observe. In the aesthetics of Tarr the states start turning into physical places and details become more than important. The Man from London was his first international film, followed by The Turin Horse (2010) which is - according to Tarr - his final film.After Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) it took five years for Tarr to get a chance to work with a feature-length film. In 2005 Tarr started to film The Man from London but the producer suddenly committed a suicide. After emotional and financial difficulties the film got a new producer and was finished in 2007. It's minimalist as usual but has surprisingly many dramatic ingredients for Tarr: A man lives in the island of Corsica with his wife and daughter. He works at the dock, supervising it and its train service. One day he witnesses a crime from his glass ivory tower; two men fight because of a suitcase and the other dies. The man takes advantage of this situation and goes to pick up the case - full of money.The crime plot is just part of the frame-story, even that the cinematography is at times very noir-like, as it was in Tarr's earlier film Damnation (1988). It's quite an unusual story for him but it's not the story that fascinates us. It's the images, sound-scape and the wonderful entirety. Bela Tarr's work can easily be separated into two parts: The first consists of his Hungarian features that tried to depict social reality through documentary-like style. The second was opened by Damnation (1988) where the films turned black-and-white, dramatic ingredients were cut to minimum and the length of the shots grew. Sátántangó was the culmination of this profound aesthetic reorientation.Another difference between these two eras is the depiction of time and place. The documentary-like fictions were set in certain cities, depicting the Hungarian reality. But in the second part the milieus turned into unclear rural communities which tried to depict a more universal and abstract world. The Man from London doesn't exactly take place in countryside as Damnation, Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies do, but it also portrays an abstract world. The characters live in a rural community; general stores, old shacks and run-down clothes. The East-European reality exhaled from Tarr's Hungarian films but The Man from London is strictly universal with its pessimistic world view and depiction of essential themes of humanity.There are many things that could be brought up about the film, such as the brilliant development of aesthetics and the construction of the state, the relation between sound and image, and the time of the film. But perhaps the most important thing is how the cinematographer, Fred Kelemen, uses light. As we know film is art of light, and it feels that no one else understands it as beautifully as Bela Tarr does today. This is another strong parallel to Andrei Tarkovsky who's probably Tarr's biggest influence. Just as in the films by Tarkovsky (especially in Nostalghia and The Sacrifice) in The Man from London, the state builds up and develops through light. Once the viewer can see a luminous - ethereal - state and then suddenly it changes to a dark one, full of agony and despair. The ending is one extremely intriguing example of this. As the camera first films the face of the woman and then the image overexposes. In cinema it is very important whether you fade to black or overexpose the image to an ethereal state. The significance of the state should not be forgotten, as film is both art of light and art of state. The Man from London is a unique masterpiece for its style, content and philosophy. It's Kafkaesque for its absurd black-humor and existentialist for its philosophy of film and characterization; we're thrown into the world, doomed to be free and forced to give our life a meaning. Existentialism and the absurdity of being are all part of Bela Tarr's art, and it reinforces the desolate despair in his films. Bela Tarr hardly ever cuts (the film lasts for over two hours and consists of 26 shots) but he uses a lot of internal montage; when the camera moves the dimensions of the image change and the entire state changes, without a cut. The film is Bressonian minimalist and Tarkovskyan poetic; it's important to see that Tarr doesn't try to reach realism nor naturalism. The Man from London is very expressionistic for its cinematographic style and visuals but there is something more in the black-and-white images than just aesthetic styling. Color is an over-naturalist element for Tarr and using black-and-white film he makes it sure that the reality of cinema and the Reality remain separated.It's a film where nothing happens but where, on the other hand, everything happens. The Man from London has an inconsolable world view and disconsolate despair. It's incredibly pessimistic depicting the hopelessness of the world and the decay of morality. All the characters of it live in an unclear place but are all trapped. They can't move forward; they're stuck in their desolate situations and are pretty much going to die in them. The protagonist feels powerful at his work, he supervises and controls the environment but at home, in his personal life, he can't come to terms with his existence and is unable of facing his troubles - he is a prisoner of his own limited world. Optimism for a better life, the hope for something better changes him, and his morality.

robert-temple-1 This film has many extraordinarily interesting qualities, but they are all ruined by the apparent vanity of the director, who appears to be a kind of inverted snob (I watched the interview of him on the DVD). The first shot of the film lasts about five minutes, maybe more, and is interminably boring, moving at slower than a snail's pace. But the director, a Hungarian named Bela Tarr, is determined that we must watch it, perhaps on the theory that anyone lacking the patience to do so is one of the unworthy ones, and does not deserve to see the rest of what he considers his masterpiece. The film defies all normal expectations of a viewing public and does not appear to be made for audiences at all, but rather an example of the director making something to please himself and his two or three best friends. The film is in black and white, and the cinematography is spectacularly good. Tarr gives the impression that he wishes to evoke the same moods as the famous night photos of Paris by Brassai. The film is based upon a novel by Georges Simenon, and the dialogue is in a mixture of French and English, with no Hungarian spoken, as all the Hungarian actors are dubbed in either French or English. It is supposedly set in a French port which has a ferry whose passengers disembark onto a waiting train. We often see them doing this at night, heads bowed, like passengers entering the Afterlife, carrying small valises to last them for Eternity. The film is based so entirely upon images that, if not for its sluggishness, it would qualify as Imagiste in the tradition of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle ('H.D.'). In his interview, the Director says it is not necessary to hear the dialogue or read the subtitles, as the images speak for themselves. Tarr appears to be inspired by the films of Carl Dreyer, and wishes to sear our sight with ravaged faces, upon which the camera lingers for whole minutes, in the hope that souls will emerge from the eyes and the skin, with the characters' inner depths spilling out like guts on the battlefield. Long, sombre shots where nothing happens are suddenly interspersed with explosions of intense and violent human emotions. Characters who had seemed dead have their electricity turned on and suddenly start shouting and gesticulating. In this melée the chamaeleon-like Tilda Swinton (who is always likely to turn up in the most bizarre settings, and the stranger it is, the more certain we can be that she will be there) has a cameo part, which may have required one or two days's shooting time (or should I say weeks, at Tarr's pace?) Once again, she startles us with her brilliance. Making good use of her fluent French, she plays a desperate, shrieking, terrified harridan of a wife to a man who never speaks and has no money, played by a taciturn Miroslav Krobot, with knitted brow and lips stuck together with glue. The weird music by Mihaly Vig is hauntingly effective, drawing upon its sheer monotony to create a captivating and eerie atmosphere which matches the film to perfection. A girl named Erika Bok plays the daughter of Swinton and Krobot, and is utterly fascinating in her slack-jawed ugliness and simulated stupidity, so that one cannot take one's eyes off her. All of the characters are like figures from a dream, none seems real. Surely these are the people who come to haunt one at night when one has had too much fois gras and sauterne. Can people like Tilda Swinton even exist? I have in other reviews pointed out that she is an extraterrestrial at least, if not someone from another dimension. As for Erika Bok, she cannot possibly exist, she has to be invented. The ultra-weird Istvan Lenart, speaking with the dubbed voice of Edward Fox sounding like a séance-voice of a disembodied spirit reciting the Creed at a black mass, or a corpse enunciating its views from its crypt, outdoes even Swinton in non-human appearance, in the competition to appear unreal and trans-human. He has more folds and wrinkles to his face than a rhinoceros, and has the eyes of a dead man who has lain in his grave for at least twenty years without rotting down properly. This film is like a film full of nocturnal zombies, but the film itself is also like a zombie, since it is clearly just as asleep as a ward full of sedated patients in a lunatic asylum, who have all just had electric shock treatment and forgotten who they are before passing out of consciousness. If Tarr were not so vain, and had been willing to make this film watchable, it could have been an astounding classic. But he is even more irritating than the French director Jacques Rivette, whose 'La Belle Noiseuse' (1991) I had previously believed to be the Number One Most Boring and Interminable Film of All Time. Why does Tarr want to bore us to death and drive us away? Because he is 'above' such things as audiences and viewers? If so, we are so far beneath him that we truly do not deserve him. He should be making films for jungle sloths. What a terrible waste, that a man with such talent should be so perverse in refusing to make 'compromises' that he forgets that films are meant to be seen by people, and not to be kept at home in a locked drawer. 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!'

fnaticchi Completely & unbelievably pretentious. Forget beautiful cinematography, it was just long black & white shots & there are only so many times one can play on shadow & light before even the dimmest member of the audience gets the message. Forget the tragedy of the human condition, it's all been done before & in a much better, so much less pretentious way.As for the switching between English & French...why? Pretentious rubbish. I am both English & French & it annoyed ME!The symbolism was so heavy-handed it was like being hit with a sledgehammer. So little sublety that at times I was actually convinced it was a spoof!The director obviously felt that if he made a film boring & pretentious enough, everyone would think it was terribly 'deep' & judging by some the comments on here, he was right!