The cinema of Hungarian director Béla Tarr is distinctive enough to be recogniseable from just a couple of minutes of screen time, and his most recent work The Man From London is no exception. A stylish but resolutely unhurried ode to film noir featuring many of Tarr's signature elements – high contrast monochrome cinematography, long tracking shots that follow characters, slow drifts around rooms that pick up on small but significant moments as they go – but with a more accessible plot than in many of his previous works, based as it is on a novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon. The film was also nominated for the Palme D'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, losing out to Cristian Mungui's powerful 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, also screened by us in a previous season.

You can read more about the film and the screening here.

You can read the DVD Outsider review of the film here.