Screened out of competition on 19 May 1980 at the 33rd Cannes Film Festival, the film was badly received by the majority of French critics, some of whom offered review titles such as "Zero for Fellini", "A Tiring Deception", "A Disaster", as well as "A Mountain of Tedious Pretension". Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, in Rome that year for the pre-production of "Nostalghia", noted in his diary that "City of Women" was a fiasco: "At the Cannes Festival the papers said that Fellini's last film was a total disaster, and that he himself had ceased to exist. It's terrible, but it's true, his film is worthless."