npr movie review tar

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part, he would not have made the movie. Critic Bob Mondello says the filmmaker's faith in his star is well placed.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

MONDELLO: ...From Adam Gopnik, the real-life writer for The New Yorker, playing himself, who's about to interview her for an audience that's as eager to see her as she is eager to be seen. The camera is on Lydia, standing backstage as she has a thousand times in concert halls and many times in lecture halls. And though you'd think this would all be second nature, she looks as if she'd flee if she could. Until...

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

MONDELLO: Lydia is performing and has the audience rapt. And afterwards, a young woman approaches, as young women apparently often do. Lydia is the first female conductor of a German symphony orchestra, which makes her a role model. And she has a child with the woman who is first violin for that orchestra, which makes her another kind of role model. As her assistant ushers Lydia away from the female admirer and Lydia lingers, writer-director Todd Field gives us our first glimpse of an artist who thinks boundaries don't apply, and that's reinforced in a different way when she publicly shreds a student conductor who's challenged the orthodoxy of dead, white, male composers at a class at Juilliard.

Her cruelty with the student and with her assistant and even with her life partner is something she does not display at talks with The New Yorker. But at orchestra rehearsals for an upcoming recording of Mahler's "Fifth Symphony," she is breathtaking.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

MONDELLO: Blanchett, whose way with even the most ordinary line has enough tonal modulation to make her voice seem a musical instrument, learned not just to conduct an orchestra and to play piano but to speak German for this part.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

MONDELLO: As impressive as Blanchett's performance is, it's matched by Field's script, which rewards close listening not just for its wit and precision, but for the way it conveys the dissonance that creeps into Lydia Tar's life - say, in the musical intervals that distract her - in a distant scream, a police siren, what sounds like a doorbell.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

MONDELLO: After earning eight Oscar nominations with his first two films, "In The Bedroom" and "Little Children," Field took 16 years to devise "Tar." And considering the nuanced balance he's striking between Lydia's predatory, manipulative behavior and the aesthetic perfection of her work, it's hard to begrudge him a moment of that time. With Blanchett at the center of virtually every scene, "Tar's" portrait of an artist who attempts to conduct life and is upended by her conduct in life feels so fiery and passionate it blisters. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors.

Now streaming on:

Throughout the new film written and directed by Todd Field , its title character, a person of exceptionally sensitive hearing and possibly perfect pitch, is almost constantly distracted from her vital activities by extraneous noise. The noises include a doorbell, or something like a doorbell, dinging—our title character, Lydia Tár, almost absently reproduces its two notes on her piano after being ruffled by them—a metronome ticking, people pounding on doors, and more. And the noises are rendered via an audio design that is often disturbingly precise in its directional placement—we are as startled by them as Lydia is.

I was reminded of a recording made in the 1980s by the Dadaist sample-based music group Negativland, in which they bemoaned: “Is there any escape from noise?” In our world, as in the world of this film, as it happens, the answer is "No." Or perhaps “Not entirely.” Lydia Tár’s world—conjured with incredible agility and grace and mystery by Field in his first feature film in 16 years—is one in which the near-impossible escape is attempted via music. Specifically classical music, and more specifically classical music that aspires to sublimity.

Played with fierce and seamless commitment by Cate Blanchett , Lydia Tár is one of the wonders of the classical realm. She is a virtuoso pianist, an earnest ethnomusicologist, and a purposeful popularizer—she is apparently a member of the EGOT club, which isn’t a common achievement for a classical person. And as a protean conductor about to conclude recording a cycle of Mahler symphonies, Lydia needs to get away from noise to do the work to which she almost stridently commits herself.

Is applause noise? In the movie’s opening scene, a nervous Lydia walks out onto the stage of a concert hall to rapturous tribute. She’s not there to perform, but to be interviewed, as a feature of one of those culture festivals major metropolitan centers hold every so often. Her interviewer is New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who plays himself in a performance possibly lacking in self-awareness—the gleam in his eye as he interviews Lydia is one of an inveterate, serenely self-satisfied know-it-all. The exposition here sets Lydia’s cultural status in a kind of stone, so the viewer looks forward to a film that will show how the sausage, so to speak, is made.

Lydia is a busy person. She has a quiet, glum, efficient assistant named Francesca ( Noémie Merlant ) whom Lydia addresses with less warmth than most humans would apply to Siri or Alexa. Francesca watches from a distance as Lydia, in an advanced conducting seminar at Juilliard, passionately and profanely riffs against aspects of identity culture after one of her students proclaims with flat banal arrogance that as a queer BIPOC they can’t get with Bach, on account of the composer’s patriarchal lifestyle. As she prepares to leave New York for her base in Berlin, where she’ll be recording the last symphony in her Mahler cycle, the Fifth, she lunches with a fellow conductor, Elliot Kaplan ( Mark Strong ), who gossips with her like a peer but who clearly envies her. She tells him of her plans for the Berlin orchestra, including “rotating” an older colleague whose ear isn’t what it used to be.

The conductor also has a pursuer, or maybe more than one pursuer. We see the back of one’s head during the Gopnik interview. We see an iPhone screen recording Lydia and texting snarky comments to someone on the FaceTime call. She is not universally beloved.

Nor is she particularly lovable. On returning home, she upbraids her wife, Sharon ( Nina Hoss ) for keeping too many lights on in their elaborate, in sections bunker-like, Berlin apartment. Is Sharon subsidizing the power utility? There’s some business with Lydia hoarding pills that are supposed to belong to Sharon. The couple has a daughter, Petra; Lydia dotes on the little girl constantly, and late in the movie, as Lydia’s world is flying apart, Sharon (who is also the orchestra’s concertmaster, as it happens) notes that Lydia’s relationship with Petra is the only non-transactional one in her life.

And, in a sense, this is true. As an artist, she is a constant interrogator. This is the means by which she achieves what she considers the only worthwhile end: serving the composer. She has a slightly reactionary aesthetic. While Gopnik introduces her as a champion of female composers, including Julia Wolfe, she disses the Icelandic musician Anna Thorvaldsdottir as a sexy flash-in-the-pan guilty of what Lydia considers the greatest artistic crime, that of vague intentions. (All of the musicians referenced in the film, and there are a lot of them, are real; this is, among other things, a meticulously researched work.)

But as a person, she’s selfish by default and without hesitation. She serves Lydia Tár. And Lydia has a lot of appetites. In Berlin, she is knocked sideways by news of the suicide of a former protégé. And even as she’s trying to cover her tracks in this affair, erasing emails and pressing Francesca to do same, Lydia sets her sights on Olga ( Sophie Kauer ) a promising young cellist, playing games with senior orchestra members to promote the rookie. Who is, as an audition scene takes pains to convey, a superb player. But still. The look Lydia gives Olga at their first lunch is almost literally wolfish.

“TÁR” is that rarest of items: a prestige awards contender that’s also a genuine art film. The narrative unspools in an insinuating, sometimes enigmatic way; Field is quite a distance from the bluntness of his last feature, 2006’s “ Little Children .” Certain shots and sequences show compositional affinities with Stanley Kubrick (for whom Field worked, as an actor, in 1999’s “ Eyes Wide Shut ,” Kubrick’s final film) and Tarkovsky. But the formal virtuosity on display here is in a quieter register than in many other such films. That’s true for the note-perfect acting as well.

Much has already been written about how the film’s narrative draws from emerging stories of abusive and exploitative behavior by powerful people in the arts. Are the sublime aspirations and achievements of a Lydia Tár vitiated by her problem-person behavior, or is she finally In The Right Anyway? As it happens, Field’s film is almost equally skeptical of the culture from which a figure like Tár arose as it is of the contemporary strain in culture that seeks to debunk her. In the end, "TÁR" is not a diatribe or parable, but an interrogation, one that seeks to draw the viewers in, and compel them to consider their own place in the question.

Opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 7th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

Now playing

Asleep in My Palm

Tomris laffly.

Brian Tallerico

The American Society of Magical Negroes

Robert daniels.

Love Lies Bleeding

Peyton Robinson

God Save Texas

Matt zoller seitz, film credits.

Rated R for some language and brief nudity.

158 minutes

Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár

Nina Hoss as Sharon Goodnow

Noémie Merlant as Francesca Lentini

Mark Strong as Eliot Kaplan

Julian Glover as Andris Davis

Allan Corduner as Sebastian Goodnow

Sophie Kauer as Olga Metkina

Sylvia Flote as Krista Taylor

Vincent Riotta as Cory Berg

Cinematographer

Florian Hoffmeister
Monika Willi
Hildur Guðnadóttir

Latest blog posts

The People’s Joker and Six Other Films That Were Stuck in Legal Limbo

Metrograph Highlights Remarkable Career of Lee Chang-dong

Female Filmmakers in Focus: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera

On Luca, Tenet, The Invisible Man and Other Films from the Early Pandemic Era that Deserve More Big-Screen Time

Supported by

Critic’s Pick

‘Tár’ Review: A Maestro Faces the Music

Cate Blanchett stars as a world-famous conductor heading for a fall in Todd Field’s chilly, timely backstage drama.

Share full article

By A.O. Scott

Early in “Tár” there is a shot of a Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands. Whose hands? That question will turn out to be relevant to the plot, but for the moment it is overwhelmed by the mystique of the page’s subject, who is also the protagonist of Todd Field’s cruelly elegant, elegantly cruel new film.

Her name is Lydia Tár, and in the world Field has imagined — one that exists at an oblique angle to our own — it’s a household name. She is introduced to us by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik , humbly playing himself as he interviews Lydia, regally played by Cate Blanchett, on a Manhattan stage. Gopnik’s introductory remarks provide a Wikipedia-style summary with a bit of Talk of the Town filigree, establishing that this is a person who surely needs no introduction.

Lydia’s résumé is a litany of meritocratic glory and upper-middlebrow glitter so lustrous as to verge on satire. She’s a conductor and composer — a maestro — who claims Leonard Bernstein as her mentor and whose career has been a steady ascent through the great orchestras of Cleveland, Boston and New York to her current perch at the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a Harvard Ph.D. and belongs to the highly exclusive EGOT club, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. She has recorded all of Mahler’s symphonies but one, which is coming soon, as is a book, “Tár on Tár,” that will surely be a best seller.

How did she do it? If Lydia Tár were a real person, “Tár” might take the conventional musical biopic route, tracing a path from modest beginnings through hard work and lucky breaks, adversity and triumph. That would be a remarkable story, given that in the real world vanishingly few major orchestras have been led by women. (Nathalie Stutzmann, recently installed as musical director of the Atlanta Symphony , is currently the only one in America, as Marin Alsop was until she stepped down from the Baltimore Symphony last year.)

Like “Late Night,” the 2019 movie which cast Emma Thompson as a powerful network television talk-show host, “Tár” doesn’t so much smash a glass ceiling as dissolve it by creative fiat. Lydia’s rise is not what we are here to see. She has been installed at the pinnacle of her profession so that we may witness her fall.

Following Lydia from New York back home to Berlin, Field strews omens and red herrings in her path, slowly and deliberately fostering a mood of dread and paranoia. She receives an anonymous gift — a signed early edition of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge” — that she destroys in an airplane lavatory. Strange noises at home disrupt her sleep and distract her from her work. A curious visual motif, a maze or mandala, turns up mysteriously in odd places.

Meanwhile, there are hints of domestic and professional trouble. Lydia lives with Sharon (Nina Hoss), the Philharmonic’s first violinist, and their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic). The couple’s intimacy is edged with wariness and unspoken resentment. Sharon looks perpetually tired. Their child is being bullied in school. The orchestra’s long-serving second conductor (Allan Corduner) has outstayed his welcome. Lydia’s assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who has musical ambitions of her own, gazes at her boss with adoration, terror and simmering rage. A young Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), auditions for a place in the string section, catching Lydia’s attention with her expressive bowing technique and her blue suede boots. (Kauer, a professional cellist as well as an actor, does her own playing in the film.)

Field, whose chilly, psychologically charged style evokes Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick — he had a small, memorable role in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” — records it all with ruthless detachment and fanatical control. He moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror. We can’t be sure if Lydia is the monster, the victim, or both.

Does the suspense that builds through the film’s long, faultlessly executed middle section arise from the dread that something terrible will happen to her, or the premonition that she will do something horrible? Both outcomes are plausible. Early on, we witness her discreet betrayal and casual gaslighting of Sharon, her quiet humiliation of a benefactor and rival conductor (Mark Strong) and her chilling confrontation with Petra’s bully. That scene, in which Lydia introduces herself as “Petra’s father” and threatens a small child in perfect German, is both thrilling and terrifying. Her charisma is overpowering, her power unchecked and her confidence absolute.

That will all change, a process Field observes with almost unbearable objectivity. If he refrains from schadenfreude, he also withholds compassion. While “Tár” unfolds in a rarefied cultural space, where aesthetic perfection seems less an ideal than a daily expectation, it also plants itself in a tawdry and contentious zone of contemporary discourse. Field leaves no doubt that Lydia is a tremendous musician, capable of matching Mahler’s genius with her own, and inspiring others to scale the peaks of greatness in her company. Blanchett is completely convincing in this regard — and also in showing Lydia’s imperiousness, her sadism and her predatory manipulation of younger women like Francesca and Olga.

At one point, Sharon describes all of Lydia’s relationships — except with their daughter — as “transactional.” This is a precise, if somewhat abstract, word for a chaotic, destructive pattern of behavior that Lydia’s position has allowed her to get away with. Her comeuppance is equally chaotic, as “Tár” refuses to resolve itself either into a parable of #MeToo justice or a rant about the excesses of cancel culture. (It’s so committed to its noncommittal stance that it sacrifices a dramatic ending for a ragged, wandering, superfluous denouement.)

Toward the end, Leonard Bernstein shows up, in a wobbly black-and-white video recording of one of his Young People’s Concerts, to explain that the meaning of music lies in “how it makes you feel.” A piece of music, he says, carries you through time on an emotional journey that defies easy summary. Sometimes, the feelings are so complicated and particular that they don’t have names, and “Tár,” whose smooth visual surface is roiled by the passions of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony , Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor and Hildur Gudnadottir’s original score, approaches that condition.

It invites you to think hard about Lydia, about the meaning of her work and the consequences of her actions, about whether she is someone you should admire or revile, about whether artists should be judged by their work or by how they live their lives. In different contexts, Lydia herself argues both sides of that question, as many of us do, and to search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off. We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.

Tár Rated R. Violent dissonance. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

“X-Men ’97,” a revival on Disney+ that picks up where the ’90s animated series left off, has faced questions after the firing of its showrunner ahead of the premiere.

“3 Body Problem,” a science fiction epic from the creators of “Game of Thrones,” has arrived on Netflix. We spoke with them about their latest project .

For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in Hillary Clinton’s image. With “The Girls on the Bus,” that’s beginning to change .

“Freaknik,” a new Hulu documentary, delves into the rowdy ’80s and ’90s-era spring festival that drew hundreds of thousands of Black college students to Atlanta.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime and Hulu to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

You make NHPR possible.

NHPR is nonprofit and independent. We rely on readers like you to support the local, national, and international coverage on this website. Your support makes this news available to everyone.

Give today. A monthly donation of $5 makes a real difference.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Baton Charge

By Anthony Lane

What do you mean, you’ve never heard of Lydia Tár? Come on, you must know her. She was a protégée of Bernstein’s. She’s the one who conducted orchestras in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York before taking charge of the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—the royal flush of accolades. It’s true that she happens to be a fictional character, incarnated by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s new movie, “Tár,” but that is a footling detail. This woman is alive, ominously articulate, crisply styled, and all too present. She burns like a cool flame.

When we first meet Lydia, she’s about to be interviewed onstage, in New York, by my colleague Adam Gopnik , who is persuasively played, in an audacious stroke of casting, by himself. (One presumes that Robert Pattinson was unavailable.) Questioned about her art, Lydia launches into an impassioned riff on the nature of musical time; asked about gender, she names various trailblazers who took to the podium before her but seems otherwise unconcerned with couching her achievement in strictly feminist terms. Her trail is her own.

Not long afterward, in a less genial scene, Lydia bumps into identity politics head on. During a class that she’s giving to would-be conductors at Juilliard, one of them claims, “as a BIPOC pangender person,” not to be “into Bach,” who is very dead and very white and had the patriarchal nerve to father twenty children. Lydia strikes back. According to taste, you will either cheer her majestic gutting of twenty-first-century self-regard, and her stout defense of high aesthetic principles, or agree with the student that she’s “a fucking bitch.” But wait. The battle lines between such opposing points of view, Field suggests, may not be as clear as all that, and, over two hours and forty minutes, the war grows very messy indeed.

Lydia, who calls herself “a U-Haul lesbian,” lives in Berlin with her partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. In a movie short on tenderness, it’s a rare joy to watch them dance together to Count Basie. The couple have an adopted daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who is obviously close to Lydia’s heart. But not that close. The strongest venting of parental emotion that we witness is not a hug but a funny and frightening sequence in which Lydia crosses the school playground, confronts a kid who’s been bullying Petra, and tells her, mezzo piano, “I’ll get you.” The urge to protect becomes a tigerish threat. What Blanchett captures so well in Lydia are the moments when decisiveness stiffens into ferocity. Her virtues, like her formidable gifts, have claws, and, as with anyone whose professional mission is to take command of others, you can’t help wondering what will befall her if, for one reason or another, she loses command of herself.

Here come the reasons. Through glimpses of e-mails, passing chatter, and scraps of dreams, we learn of a young trainee conductor who was fixated on Lydia (or was it vice versa?), and whose career Lydia has since attempted to block. There are hints of a pattern—of other young women who have slipped under Lydia’s spell and suffered accordingly. Her personal assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), is a guarded and dedicated soul, who receives scant reward for her devotions; was she, too, once an object of Lydia’s interest? Rumors abound, a legal deposition is required, and Lydia is Tárred and feathered on social media. When she travels to New York, in the company of a Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer), we see a snap of them, on Twitter, plus the tagline “TÁR’s fresh meat.”

Most of the movie is set in the fortress of serious classical music, on the loftiest levels, where the stars take private jets. Your grip, as a viewer, will probably be more secure if you know what free bowing means, and who Thomas Beecham was, and what DG and MTT stand for (Deutsche Grammophon and Michael Tilson Thomas, respectively). And for those of us who have never quite understood what an assistant conductor does, “Tár” supplies the answer, in the old-school shape of Sebastian (Allan Corduner). After a rehearsal of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which will soon be recorded live, Sebastian presents Lydia with a highly specific query about the clarinets. However niche you reckon his job must be, it’s nicher.

Why, then, would I recommend “Tár” to friends who couldn’t give a damn about Mahler’s marriage, or Glenn Gould ’s posture at the piano—wonderfully mimicked by Blanchett—or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s relationship with the Nazis, or any of the other arcana that crop up? Because, strange to say, this film is not really about music. It’s about power. (Likewise, if you stayed away from “ Ford v Ferrari ,” in 2019, because it was targeted at car geeks, you missed an absorbing dramatization of rivalry and grit.) What matters, in the case of Sebastian, is not the fact that Lydia disagrees about the clarinets but, rather, the merciless manner in which she later fires him—or, in her phrase, “rotates” him—and throws in a character assassination as a cadenza. Conversely, check out the gleam in her gaze at the sight and the sound of Olga, who is not only hired by the Berlin Philharmonic but also, thanks to Lydia’s fine-fingered machinations, swiftly granted the solo part in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The expression on the face of the resident first cellist, who had every right to expect the gig, is a study in decorous disappointment. Power leaves hope in its wake.

This is not the first movie about a classical conductor to be written, directed, and produced by an American filmmaker. Preston Sturges’s “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948) also fits the bill. Its baton-wielding hero, played with gusto by Rex Harrison, sported a vocational glee that would be anathema to Lydia. (“All I do is wave a little wand a little and out comes the music.”) Yet the tale was Sturges’s most wicked offering, its farcical theme adorned with grace notes of murderous intent, and a strain of that menace finds an echo in “Tár.” It’s only Field’s third feature, after “In the Bedroom” (2001) and “Little Children” (2006), and anyone struck by the sombreness of those films—by characters driven along paths darker than they foresaw—will be ready for the shadows in which Lydia, especially in her apartment, often dwells. Berlin may look enticingly civilized, with its unhurried café life and the embracing glow of its concert hall, but follow Lydia to a scuzzier district and down into a basement, in pursuit of Olga, and you enter a dripping underworld, where Lydia whacks her head against stone steps. Throughout the story, as you’d expect, she has been hyper-attentive to noise. Now, in dread, she listens to the pattering paws of an unseen dog.

Hounding marks the final movement of the film. (It’s the one section that feels rushed. Mind you, Lydia mocks the urge to stretch out the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth to inordinate length, telling her players to “forget Visconti,” so maybe a touch of haste is no bad thing.) To what extent she is a proven predator; how much she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation; and why, despite everything, she should enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way that a middle-aged man in her position would not: such issues will, no doubt, be aired and contested in due course. Field is wise enough to reserve judgment. It would be dead wrong, though, to consider “Tár” as a kind of op-ed made flesh. Treat it, instead, as a symphonic portrait, richly suffused with unhappiness; none of the people onscreen, aside from the headlong Olga, seem content with their lot, unless and until they are actually making music—without which, as Nietzsche said, life would be a mistake.

In the hands of a different actress, the portrait might well have fallen apart. “Tár” sans Blanchett is no more conceivable than “Born Yesterday” (1950) without Judy Holliday or “Erin Brockovich” (2000) without Julia Roberts . Nobody else would fit the frame. We have seen Blanchett, in previous roles, being flaky, noble, or mean, but the profusion of moods and motivations that is demanded of her here is something else. The part of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother, dictator, and fuckup, and Blanchett responds with perfect pitch. Her eyes are like spies, missing nothing, and her smile is a charmer’s knife. As the conductor is to the Berlin Philharmonic, so the actress is to the audience in the cinema; neither makes the grave mistake of wishing merely to be liked. If there is one gesture of hers, in “Tár,” that I didn’t entirely buy, it’s the single act of violence—of sacrilege, one might say, for it occurs in the midst of a performance—with which Lydia puts herself beyond the pale. Not so much brutal as brusque, the deed is too melodramatic for the subtle inflections that Field applies elsewhere. If you’re bent upon maleficence, as Rex Harrison demonstrated, then do it in style.

I have a practical motion to propose, arising from Field’s film. An orchestra, as Lydia points out, is “not a democracy,” but, nonetheless, might it be helpful if classical musicians took the word “maestro” and slung it out of circulation? Does the aura that enfolds it not lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all, don’t be surprised if you wind up as a slave to the rhythm. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier .

Where the Amish go on vacation .

How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune .

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves ?

Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four

By Alex Ross

Harrowing Melodrama in “A Different Man”

By Justin Chang

clock This article was published more than 1 year ago

‘Tár’: A seductive deep dive into a woman’s unraveling psyche

Cate blanchett has created the most indelible movie character this year.

Behold Lydia Tár: lithe and silkily glamorous as a Saluki , an intricately coiled helix of genius, nervous tics, elegant taste and steely nerve. Watching Cate Blanchett inhabit the most indelible character to materialize on-screen this year is to witness a fascinating feat of artistic doubling, wherein Blanchett brings her angular physicality and a quick, slashing intelligence to bear on a woman who’s creating herself in real time. “Tár,” the film that wraps around its mesmerizing antiheroine like a fawn-colored cashmere wrap, is less a movie than a seductive deep dive into an unraveling psyche of a woman who’s simultaneously defined by and apart from the world she has so confidently by the tail.

That world, in Lydia’s case, is classical music, a rarefied universe of transcendence and transaction that comes to hushed, high-stakes life in the hands of writer-director Todd Field. We meet Lydia — a renowned composer-conductor who was the protegee of Leonard Bernstein, who bestrides the Berlin Philharmonic like a sleek colossus and who has just written her memoir “Tár on Tár” — while she’s being interviewed at the New Yorker festival by the magazine’s culture writer Adam Gopnik . In an almost surreally long, real-time sequence, Gopnik (playing himself) tosses out learned questions that Lydia parries with casual brilliance, dissecting art, time, gendered language and the correct interpretation of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with erudite, offhand brio. With that single scene, Field conveys volumes of information about his protagonist, but also his bona fides as a first-class world builder: This is an environment he understands down to the last meticulously placed name-drop of Marin Alsop or Nan Talese .

Q&Q with Cate Blanchett and Todd Field

It’s also an environment that, for its outward veneer of cosmopolitan civility, roils with political scheming, sexual power plays and brazen ambition. As Lydia goes about her days — meeting with a dilettante-ish patron (Mark Strong), being interviewed by a star-struck journalist, leading a master class at Juilliard — her facade never cracks. She oversees the tailoring of her suits — copied from those worn by her male heroes — with the same ferocious perfectionism and withering contempt for complacency that she brings to the vinyl pressings she’s making for Deutsche Grammophon .

Lydia is so impressively competent, the social space she moves in so stylish and discrete, that it has no option but to come crashing down. “Tár” is an anatomy of that inevitable descent, prompted by an email to Lydia’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) from a former student that metastasizes into a personal and professional crisis of operatic proportions. Whether she’s mentoring younger musicians, “reading the tea leaves” or a composer’s emotional intent, or visiting eastern Peru to make field recordings, it turns out that Lydia’s business is essentially extractive.

Appropriately enough, Field’s script possesses its own musicality: He creates rapturous curlicues of heady dialogue that on its surface explores the nuances of post-#MeToo standards of workplace behavior and what has come to be known as cancel culture. Those thematic elements give “Tár” its frissons of resonance and ambiguity, with Lydia making a persuasive case for separating art from the artist. At Juilliard, she admits that as a “ U-Haul lesbian ,” she has little use for “ol’ Ludwig.” (The fundamental question, she insists, is, “Can music by old white men exalt us?”) When she’s finally confronted with her own infractions, what were abstract arguments become increasingly germane, and it becomes clear that what we think we’re watching — an illustrious career brought low by bad behavior, the twist being that the malefactor is a woman — is something else entirely.

That something is more interior, more chaotic and in many ways more disturbing, and it’s exquisitely limned by Field, who doles out information with tensely judicious restraint. No sooner are we ensconced in the soothing world that Lydia edgily inhabits than we discover that all those nervous twitches and superstitions aren’t the mannerisms of an egocentric artist. They’re talismans, deployed to fend off disorder and a creeping dread that, when it arrives, overmatches even Lydia’s lacerating ego and icy self-control.

This makes “Tár” sound grim, which it isn’t. Field has made a film about exploitation and self-loathing and compulsion, but with an extravagant eye for beauty and surface polish that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch. It would be enjoyable enough simply to behold Blanchett have her way with a role that she slips on with the grace and familiarity of one of Lydia’s bespoke suits. But Field has surrounded her with supporting performances that are just as alert, especially Nina Hoss’s turn as Sharon, Lydia’s patient but reflexively wary partner. Together with cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, Field films “Tár” in reassuring neutrals, his palette favoring soft grays and understated beiges. Much of the film plays out in silence — the musical score is composed by Hildur Gudnadóttir , who’s also name-checked by Lydia — a choice that emphasizes Lydia’s own hypersensitivity to the ambient sounds that constantly threaten to engulf her.

Then there’s the humor, which is so sly that it seems to operate on a frequency all its own. That Nan Talese line, for example, is both tonally perfect and hilarious, as are tossed-off asides about Clara Zetkin , NPR and the fact that Lydia’s dazzled young interviewer went to Smith. Late in the film, when a neighbor stops by Lydia’s studio to complain about the noise she’s making, she initially misunderstands, flashing a camera-ready smile and enthusing with fake modesty, “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

By far “Tár’s” best joke is saved for last, when Field speeds up the metronome and sends Lydia on a dizzying spiral that takes her far from Berlin, in a place where personal, professional and aesthetic reckoning land like a dissonant chord. The moral of the story seems simple enough: Keep it in your pants, boys and girls, lest you wind up in what could easily pass for sheer hell.

R. At area theaters. Contains some strong language and brief nudity. 153 minutes.

You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience.

NCPR Podcasts

More podcasts from NPR

Movie review: tár.

The film Tár is at once a meditation on a celebrated woman who abuses her stardom, and a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett.

More from NPR

Concrete structures meant to protect baltimore bridge appear unchanged for decades, these twin brothers are identical, but their autism isn't, powerball jackpot jumps to $1.23 billion after another drawing without a big winner, how does avian flu affect your breakfast; nato solemnly celebrates 75th anniversary, a mayor in ukraine aids his town's few remaining people, as russia closes in, virginia lawmakers have voted to raise the marriage age to 18. most states haven't, doj takes a stand against war crimes in ukraine. in gaza war, it's been nearly silent, california colleges provide abortion pills but many fail to make students aware, taiwan emerges remarkably unscathed after massive earthquake, what to know about the risks of the bird flu outbreak, amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs in its cloud computing unit aws, no more 'just walk out' at amazon grocery stores. the new bet is smart shopping carts.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

‘Tár’ Review: Cate Blanchett Acts With Ferocious Force in Todd Field’s Masterful Drama

The actor creates a study in power, passion, and entitlement in a movie so real it's immersive.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

‘Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s War on Democracy’ Review: A Scary Look at the Potential Soldiers of a Second Trump Reign 2 days ago
Remembering Louis Gossett Jr. in ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’: His Timeless Acting Elevated the Movie Drill Sergeant Into a Mythic Figure 5 days ago
‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’ Review: A Godzilla Spectacle Minus One Thing: A Reason to Exist 7 days ago

“Tár,” written and directed by Todd Field , tells the story of a world-famous symphony orchestra conductor played by Cate Blanchett , and let me say right up front: It’s the work of a master filmmaker. That’s not a total surprise. Field has made only two previous films, and the first of them, the domestic revenge drama “In the Bedroom” (2001), was languorous and lacerating — a small, compact indie-world explosion. His second feature, “Little Children” (2006), was a misfire, though his talent was all over it.

Blanchett, in a performance that’s destined to make her a major presence in this year’s awards season, plays Lydia Tár, one of the most celebrated conductors of her time. The film opens with an enigmatic shot of a text-message exchange, which will gradually pierce us as its meaning comes to light. It then goes into an extended sequence where Lydia is interviewed onstage by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker (playing himself), which allows us to discover who she is and to revel in the caginess of her cultivated stardom. Lydia, we learn, has been the conductor of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic (among other prestige posts), and for seven years she has led the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s an EGOT winner, and her mentor was Leonard Bernstein, who pioneered the role of the American conductor as larger-than-life figure. Lydia, like Lenny, possesses powers of articulation that rival her musical skills.

Blanchett’s performance first strikes us as a tad theatrical; she almost seems to be reciting the lines. But what we realize is that Lydia herself is giving a performance, pitching her persona to the New York swells, stitching together pensées and anecdotes she has told dozens of times. Offstage, she’s as fiery and spontaneous as she was fake-spontaneous in the interview, as we see her in assorted encounters, like a gossipy lunch with Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), the nerdish investment banker and part-time conductor with whom she founded the Accordian fellowship, an organization devoted to the cultivating and placing of aspiring young women conductors, or the quippy back-and-forth she enjoys with Francesca (Noémie Merlant), her comely and recessive assistant, who multitasks as devotedly as if Lydia were a high-maintenance studio executive.

One of the fascinations of “Tár” is its portrait of Lydia as a highbrow paragon who has created herself as a kind of brand. She’s a passionate scholar who lives and breathes the scores she’s conducting. She’s an ardent teacher, who in one exhilarating sequence leads a master class at Juilliard with a whiplash provocation designed to slice through the pieties — about atonal music and identity politics — that, in her opinion, have blunted the students’ sense of possibility. She’s a global celebrity who understands that conducting is a dictatorship, something she enforces within the democratic-socialist protocols that supposedly rule the Berlin orchestra. She’s a technologist of recordings, micromanaging the nuances of how her albums are made (right down to the pose on the cover photos), and an author as well, about to publicize a coffee-table book called “Tár on Tár.” And she is, in effect, a CEO, enmeshed in the office politics of managing the symphony personnel, organizing benefit concerts, constructing a fearsome global reach that’s the cornerstone of her mystique.

In this scene and so many others, Field’s script is dazzling in its conversational flow, its insider dexterity, its perception of how power in the world actually works. He creates such an elaborately enticing portrait of Lydia Tár as a public figure that when she travels back to Berlin and walks into her impossibly luxe designer home, it comes as a slight shock to realize that she also has a personal life. She is married, to the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic (played by the radiantly sane-tempered Nina Hoss), and they have a young daughter, Petra, who Lydia, amusingly, rescues from a mean-girl situation at school by speaking to the young bully in question with such a perfect terrorist threat (“I am Petra’s father…I am going to get you”) that you realize she can master the politics of any situation. Except for one.

In “Tár,” Todd Field enmeshes us in a tautly unfolding narrative of quiet duplicity, corporate intrigue, and — ultimately — erotic obsession. Yet he does it so organically that for a while you don’t even realize you’re watching a “story.” But that’s what a great story is. It doesn’t hit you over the head with telegraphed arcs. It sneaks up on you, the way that life does. Field, working with the cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, has shot “Tár” so that it looks like a documentary directed by Stanley Kubrick (who Field worked with on “Eyes Wide Shut,” back when he was an actor). The compositions are naturalistic in an imposing, ice-cool way, and what they express is the casual calculation with which Lydia monitors every facet of her existence. Her personal life, artistic career, and highly charged, verbally domineering personality are all in such powerful sync that we can’t imagine how anything could upset this apple cart.

Yet there’s one aspect of Lydia’s life that she understandably keeps on the down-low: the women she has flings with on the side. She is, in her way, a not untypical celebrity, treating sexual indulgence as something she has the license to do. In this case, part of the flavor of it emerges from the classical-music world, which has had more than its share of philanderers and predators. The reason for that, Field suggests, is that there’s something about the exalted nature of this music that leads the people who live everyday within its heady majesty to feel as if pleasure, in every realm, is their divine right.

There is also a foreshadowing glimpse, in the audience at the New Yorker interview, of a woman we see only from behind — a redhead named Krista, 25 years old and one of the Accordian fellows, who Lydia enjoyed a brief intense relationship with, until it became clear that Krista was fixated on her in a compulsive and unstable way. Lydia not only cut her loose; she campaigned, in private, against her landing a conducting position with an orchestra. But Krista can’t let go — of Lydia or of her own demons. And this is the wrong era for that to happen in.

“Tár” has been constructed ingeniously, so that the various situations Lydia is dealing with in the orchestra — like her scheme to get rid of Sebastian (Allan Corduner), the old mule of an assistant conductor — interlock in unexpected ways. Lydia cuts Sebastian loose with icy efficiency, but that means Francesca thinks it’s her time to step up and occupy the assistant-conductor slot. Lydia, however, decrees that it’s not the time. And that’s a big mistake. She’s counting on the loyalty of Francesca to get rid of the desperate, telltale email messages Krista has been sending to the two of them. Why the two of them? Because this fling was a lot more sensually complicated than other office flings.

The movie starts off as the chronicle of a magnetic, brilliant, difficult artist navigating a sea of career drama. Then, just like that, it evolves into another kind of movie — a study in what can happen when social media, the death of privacy, and a merciless new public morality conspire to hold someone, in all their flaws (including some rather monstrous ones), up to the light. Lydia rides high, only to confront the rapid spectacle of her downfall. Which is riveting, in a Greek-tragedy-in-the-age-of-YouTube-and-the-New-York-Post sort of way. There’s a moment near the end that rivals the Jackson-Maine-peeing-at-the-Grammys scene in the 2018 “A Star Is Born” for sheer jaw-dropping wowness.

Yet “Tár” also raises a fundamental question, one that will be discussed and debated with singular intensity as the movie gets released in October and then heads into awards season. That question is: Where does the film stand on the issue of what happens to Lydia? I would say that it shows her, very much, to be a predatory soul (and she herself comes face-to-face with that reality in a scene where she tries to get a massage in Thailand). Yet she is also a great artist. You could say, and I would, that the film strikes a note of ambivalence, but in a haunting sense the final judgment offered by “Tár” is not a judgement so much as a statement you can make your own judgment about. The statement is: We’re in a new world. One where people wear masks. And where the power of the sublime no longer holds sway.

Reviewed at Dolby 88 (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.

Production: A Focus Features release of a Standard Film Company, EMJAG Productions release. Producers: Todd Field, Scott Lambert, Alexandra Milchan. Executive producers: Cate Blanchett, Nigel Wooll.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Todd Field. Camera: Florian Hoffmeister. Editor: Monika Willi. Music: Hildur Guonadóttir.
With: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Mark Strong, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Sylvia Flote.

More From Our Brands

The far right is crawling with eclipse conspiracy theories, this flying motorcycle could launch by the end of the decade, kenny smith to recruit for aussie basketball, own stake in nbl club, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, ripley review: netflix’s grifter thriller is stylish but sluggish — now, you grade it, verify it's you, please log in.

LAist is part of Southern California Public Radio, a member-supported public media network.

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

facebook-rs

‘Tár’: Cate Blanchett’s Staggering Work of Complicated Genius

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

But she needs an image for the cover. Tár’s Mahler run is going to be released as a digital box set by Deutsche-Grammophon, the prestigious label whose album covers are surely among the most iconic, recognizable images in classical music, powerful assertions of musicians — conductors and soloists and small ensembles — as larger-than-life auteurs, with faces and names on par with the legendary composers that they’re playing. The occasion of a career-capping Mahler set calls for a statement piece. Tár’s instinct, in designing that image, is to look to the past.

Editor’s picks

The 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, why cate blanchett felt 'compelled' to bring the story of an iranian woman in australia to the screen, cate blanchett is fighting aliens and doing literal piss takes in the new 'borderlands' trailer, jon stewart, cate blanchett, joaquin phoenix, and more call on biden for ceasefire in gaza and israel, meet the singer who replaced scott weiland and chester bennington in stone temple pilots, stephen colbert spotlights world central kitchen deaths: 'this is not an isolated incident', biden's meeting with muslim community leaders on gaza was disastrous, jojo siwa promised them pop stardom. they say they were ‘thrown in the trash’.

The past is catching up with Tár. Or, more accurately, she’s being subjected to the present: She’s gotten away with things throughout her career that she shouldn’t have. How bad they are, how worthy they are of condemnation, how much Tár deserves what comes to her in this film — these prove subjective. Fields is not in it for the easy schadenfreude, either way. Nor is Blanchett, who, more than anything else at play, is the essence of what makes Tár work. It’s a masterful, full-bodied performance — even her way with the angularity of her face and the camera feels thought-through — and even more impressively, it’s great, delicious fun. Blanchett accomplishes the primary and most immediate task of convincing us that Tár is, indeed, worth all the fuss — that she is a genius of a kind and also the kind of unabashed top that can lead femmes to their emotional peril, that her way of sculpting time through the air with her hands as she conducts has genuine authority, that her insights into music are bone-deep, that she has the wit, intelligence, and importantly, the furtiveness and hard-to-place sexual charisma to draw the flies like honey, to everyone’s severe detriment. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

'I Don't Look for Roles That I Can Ham It Up': A Conversation with Walton Goggins

By Alan Sepinwall

Stephen Colbert Spotlights World Central Kitchen Deaths: 'This Is Not an Isolated Incident'

Current Events
By Emily Zemler

'Ripley' Lets the Talented Mr. Andrew Scott Lead an Incredible Remake

Conan o’brien to return to ‘the tonight show’ as guest.

He's Back
By Charisma Madarang

Filmmaker John Ridley, ABC, and Disney Named as Defendants in Discrimination Lawsuit

Crimes and Courts
By Kory Grow

Most Popular

Chance perdomo, 'gen v' and 'chilling adventures of sabrina' star, dies at 27, chance perdomo, 'chilling adventures of sabrina' and 'gen v' star, dies at 27, touré says diddy terminated his cousin's internship after refusing to sleep with him, barron trump’s super-rare outing with dad donald may show why we never see them together, you might also like, bob iger, after winning fierce proxy fight, says disney board’s no. 1 priority is ceo succession: ‘they’re treating it with a sense of urgency’, buyers praise new chinese style and quiet luxury at shanghai fashion week, this best-selling under-desk walking pad is over $100 off on amazon today, ‘the bride’ first look: christian bale is a punk frankenstein in maggie gyllenhaal’s sophomore feature, kenny smith to recruit for aussie basketball, own stake in nbl club.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

What's the Tomatometer®?
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening this week
Top box office
Coming soon to theaters
Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

Netflix streaming
Prime Video
Most popular streaming movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
Problemista Link to Problemista
Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

Mary & George: Season 1
Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
Sugar: Season 1
American Horror Story: Season 12
Loot: Season 2
Parish: Season 1
Ripley: Season 1
Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

What to know

Critics Consensus

Led by the soaring melody of Cate Blanchett's note-perfect performance, Tár riffs brilliantly on the discordant side of fame-fueled power. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

Tár can be tough to follow, although Cate Blanchett in the title role makes it mostly worth the effort. Read audience reviews

Where to watch tár.

Watch Tár with a subscription on Peacock, rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu, or buy on Prime Video, Apple TV, Vudu.

Rate And Review

Super Reviewer

Rate this movie

Oof, that was Rotten.

Meh, it passed the time.

It’s good – I’d recommend it.

So Fresh: Absolute Must See!

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Step 2 of 2

How did you buy your ticket?

Let's get your review verified..

AMCTheatres.com or AMC App New

Cinemark Coming Soon

We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future.

Regal Coming Soon

Theater box office or somewhere else

By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie.

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Tár photos.

From writer-producer-director Todd Field comes TÁR, starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the groundbreaking conductor of a major German Orchestra. We meet Tár at the height of her career, as she's preparing both a book launch and much-anticipated live performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Over the ensuing weeks her life begins to unravel in a singularly modern way. The result is a searing examination of power, and its impact and durability in today's society.

Rating: R (Some Language and Brief Nudity)

Genre: Drama, Music

Original Language: English

Director: Todd Field

Producer: Todd Field , Alexandra Milchan , Scott Lambert

Writer: Todd Field

Release Date (Theaters): Oct 28, 2022 wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 20, 2022

Box Office (Gross USA): $6.8M

Runtime: 2h 38m

Distributor: Focus Features

Production Co: Standard Film Company Inc., EMJAG Productions

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital

Aspect Ratio: Digital 2.39:1

Cast & Crew

Cate Blanchett

Noémie Merlant

Sharon Goodnow

Sophie Kauer

Mark Strong

Elliot Kaplan

Julian Glover

Andris Davis

Allan Corduner

Sylvia Flote

Sydney Lemmon

Whitney Reese

Vincent Riotta

Sam Douglas

Screenwriter

Alexandra Milchan

Scott Lambert

Executive Producer

Nigel Wooll

Florian Hoffmeister

Cinematographer

Monika Willi

Film Editing

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Original Music

Marco Bittner Rosser

Production Design

Patrick Herzberg

Art Director

Bina Daigeler

Costume Design

News & Interviews for Tár

Oscar Winners 2023: Full List of the 95th Academy Awards Winners

How To Watch the 2023 Oscars

Where to Watch the Oscar-Nominated Films of 2023: Streaming, on Video-on-Demand, and in Theaters

Critic Reviews for Tár

Audience reviews for tár.

There are no featured audience reviews for Tár at this time.

Movie & TV guides

Play Daily Tomato Movie Trivia

Discover What to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes Podcasts

This newscast is updated weekdays at 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, and 6pm.

Movie Review: Tár

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Conductor Lydia Tar is the kind of famous person who needs no introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAR")

ADAM GOPNIK: (As self) If you're here, then you already know who she is.

MONDELLO: So of course she's getting one...

GOPNIK: (As self) Lydia Tar is many things.

GOPNIK: (As self) Thank you for joining us, maestro.

CATE BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Thank you.

MONDELLO: She's on and charming, chatting about music and conducting and how what she does in setting the pace - the time for an orchestra - is central to its interpretation.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) You cannot start without me. See; I start the clock. In my left hand...

MONDELLO: Someone this concerned with control, you sense, is almost telegraphing that she's afraid of losing control. But as inhabited by Cate Blanchett, Lydia is quite ostentatiously in control.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Now, the illusion is that, like you, I'm responding to the orchestra in real time...

GOPNIK: (As self) Right, right.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) ...Making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing or reset it or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is...

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) (Inaudible) crescendo.

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) Please, please, please, please, you must watch. (Speaking German).

BLANCHETT: (As Lydia Tar) I keep hearing something.

(SOUNDBITE OF LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC PERFORMANCE OF MAHLER'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR - 4. ADAGIETTO. SEHR LANGSAM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

👋 Looks like you could use more news. Sign up for our newsletters.

Weekly News
Coastal Desk
Station news

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Imperious hauteur … Cate Blanchett in Tár.

Tár review – Cate Blanchett is perfect lead in delirious, sensual drama

As the maestro heading into crisis in Todd Field’s outrageous tale, Blanchett’s performance pierces like a conductor’s baton through the heart

A second viewing has swept away – with hurricane force – the obtuse worries I had at the Venice film festival about Todd Field’s entirely outrageous, delirious and sensual psychodrama starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor starting to unravel and unhinge. I had misgivings then about the climactic element of melodrama – which I now see as a deliberate and brilliant stab of dissonance, brilliantly cueing up the film’s deeply mysterious and surreal final section.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt. Her performance will pierce you like a conductor’s baton through the heart – although the real-life conductor Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has complained about the apparent parallels between her own life and Tár’s, and there has never been any suggestion of wrongdoing in Alsop’s own career.

Tár is imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as “maestro”. She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an international touring lifestyle approaching that of the super-rich, and is married to her first violinist, played by Nina Hoss, with whom she has a child. But there are problems in Tár’s life. She runs a mentoring scholarship programme for women, administered by a tiresome, oleaginous would-be conductor, played by Mark Strong, and there are rumours that this is a source of young women with whom Tár has affairs. Her assistant, played by Noémie Merlant (another would-be conductor) appears to be someone else she is keeping on an emotional string, and she is being stalked by another former mentee who has become obsessed with her; Tár has furthermore conceived a tendresse for a new cellist. Meanwhile, her guest masterclass at Juilliard goes sour when a young student, identifying as Bipoc pangender, presumes to dismiss Bach on ideological grounds.

But this movie is not about anything as banal as “cancellation”. Tár suspects that there is something wrong: she is twitchy, paranoid and insomniac. We know from the outset that she is effectively being spied on. There are strange sounds, intrusions and things out of place. And the music itself amplifies the violence just beneath the surface. It could be that Field has fallen under the spell of the maestro himself, Austrian director Michael Haneke, with the refrigerated sleekness of the film’s look and the ideas about revenge-surveillance, the return of the repressed and the tyranny and cruelty in the classical music tradition.

Tár has a job in which hubris pretty much comes with the territory. She has invented herself through conducting: no other profession and no other kind of musical career could have worked. My second viewing made me see that part of Tár’s loss of control is due to her intense reaction to Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which she wanted to perform with her protege: the extravagance and the derangement of the music. It resonates with her and with us.

Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
Drama films
Cate Blanchett
Classical music

Comments (…)

TÁR review: Cate Blanchett is her own symphony in a sublime, unsettling drama

Todd Field's stunning portrait of a composer in crisis transcends its #MeToo outlines.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Are all great artists necessarily great monsters, or is that just a story we've told ourselves for too long? The vectors of ego, talent, and personal liability collide in Todd Field's TÁR , a towering monolith of a movie rooted in an extraordinary, shattering performance by Cate Blanchett . She is Lydia Tár, whose success has earned her a rare kind of cultural cachet for a classical-music conductor: People pay just to watch her speak about her EGOT or her thoughts on Mahler, and moguls and doe-eyed groupies alike compete for the pleasure of her company. Her world is Gulfstreams and hushed hotel suites and a kind of severe, understated luxury (The devil wears Margiela , probably). There is always another prestige booking to jet off to or a class to teach at Juilliard, and a faithful assistant, Francesca ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire 's Noémie Merlant), to smooth out the details and keep the riffraff away.

Lydia also has a partner, Sharon (the great German actress Nina Hoss), and a young daughter in Berlin, where she leads the city's world-class orchestra. Their domestic life, cosseted as it is in their plush townhome and the day-to-day of intra-office politics (Sharon is also her lead violinist), contains a certain wariness: The pills Lydia urgently swallows when no one is looking aren't hers, and her interest in a new cellist, a brash Russian girl named Olga (Sophie Kauer), seems less than strictly professional. In fact she has a history of shining her light on pretty young women in the industry, and of withdrawing those affections in ways that don't always end well.

Whatever damage she leaves behind, though, tends to sink or slip away in the white noise of her fame. And also through sheer force of will: Lydia, her dark-blond hair swept back like a lion's mane and her presence the gravitational center of every room she walks into, embodies the role of maestro so completely that it's hard to imagine her ever having been a baby or even a small child; she might have sprung fully formed instead from Leonard Bernstein's forehead (naturally she knew "Lenny," a mentor).

But when a former mentee of her own commits suicide, questions of culpability and undue intimacies begin to spill over in ways that Francesca and the press department at the orchestra can no longer contain. These are the bare outlines of TÁR , though what unfolds in the film's nearly two-hour-and-40-minute runtime defy almost any kind of easy summation. Most of the first 15 minutes are fixed in an on-stage interview between Lydia and the real-life New Yorker journalist Adam Gopnik that feels, in some ways, like a pressure test — whether it will even be tenable to spend the next several hours with this person who is so mannered, so arrogant, so thoroughly consumed by her own monologue. But Lydia Tár, like all public figures, is a construct, and the remainder of the film is a wild unraveling, if not a full annihilation, of that elaborately built edifice.

Field — whose two previous films, 2001's In the Bedroom and 2006's Little Children , earned eight Academy Award nominations between them — took 16 years to make TÁR , and it feels very much like a magnum opus. His script is so masterfully formed and Lydia's world so wholly, viscerally realized that the movie becomes a sort of profound immersive experience; whatever the opposite of sensory deprivation tank is, this is it. Even the supporting parts are stupendously acted: Mark Strong as a fellow conductor who yearns to take Lydia's genius and cover himself in it like a balm; Merlant's Francesca, whose devotion and deference to her boss has subsumed nearly all of her own dreams; Hoss, who does more with her eyes in one devastating scene than most actors can do with the whole toolbox.

But the movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that it feels less like a performance than a full-body possession. That she slips often into fluent German and plays professional-grade piano in the film, among other things, is exceedingly impressive (watching her conduct, it feels like lightning might actually shoot out of her fingertips). But Lydia isn't a series of tricks and tics; she's a superstar and a virtuoso who has forgotten, perhaps, that she is also human, and that news comes for us all. Grade: A

Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?

Critics are taking todd field’s film at face value, but the final act suggests that nothing is as it seems..

Lots of writers and critics disagree about Tár , Todd Field’s film starring Cate Blanchett as an art monster and orchestral conductor whose past catches up with her. Is the movie “ the best film to date on ‘cancel culture,’ ” or is it “ a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture ”? Is Lydia Tár clearly portrayed as an “ abuser ,” or is Field “ stacking the deck in the character’s favor ”? Is Lydia Tár a real person or a fictional character ?

There is something, though, that everyone seems to agree on, and it’s what happens to Lydia Tár. (Spoilers ahead!) The conductor’s transgressions—real, exaggerated, or invented—are discovered, and they are her downfall. She loses her position, her foundation, her fame. She never gets the chance to conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the performance that would be the capstone to her career. Cancel culture (or maybe it’s just justice) has reached out and found her, and by film’s end, she has hit bottom. Google “Tár ending” and you’ll find several pieces explaining the “ bitter joke ” of the movie’s final scene, Lydia conducting video-game music for a convention full of cosplayers in an unnamed Southeast Asian city. The game? Monster Hunter. The monster has been hunted.

However, I think all of this is wrong, or at least arguable. We may see all those things on the movie screen, but I’m not convinced that’s exactly what happens in the final third of Tár . None of these articles address what is aesthetically the most puzzling aspect of Tár . Very few writers have taken up the uncanniness of its final act, the supernatural elements Field introduces, and the hints—more than hints: the big, broad pronouncements —that a great deal of what we’re seeing on the screen might just be happening inside Lydia Tár’s head.

Sign up for the Slate Culture Newsletter

The best of movies, TV, books, music, and more, delivered to your inbox.

Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.

The final act of Tár is, I think, so heightened and weird that it basically doesn’t make sense if you try to read it literally. But perhaps because the movie’s cultural questions are so fun to wrestle with, or because Field’s attention to sociological realism in the rest of the film is so acute, many viewers are determined to do so. But when I finally watched Tár , it was the movie’s spookiness, and the uncertainty that spookiness casts over the film, that stuck with me. I think Todd Field is doing something entirely different from what almost every writer so far has thought he was doing. Field “moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror,” A.O. Scott wrote in a typically insightful review that still takes much of Tár’s “comeuppance” and the movie’s “ragged, wandering, superfluous denouement” at face value. Let’s explore the gothic horror of Tár.

I’m certain I’m not the only one to write about this—it’s a big internet—but after a lot of searching, all I’ve found is this tweet, from New York Times writer Joe Bernstein …

… which the writer and historian Mark Harris amplified, with his own agreement:

It was all in your head! is, of course, an often disappointing story construct. Sometimes it really works , and sometimes it really doesn’t . I’m not ready to say that the final section of Tár is, as Bernstein believes, “a kind of hallucination or dream of personal disgrace, which therapy tells us is secretly pleasurable.” But I will go to the mat to say that reading the “plot” of Tár literally is a mistake. For long stretches of the film, we have exited the realm of realism and are firmly in the world of the supernatural. Tár is not truly a cancel culture movie. Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate.

The ghost, of course, is that of Krista Taylor, Lydia’s former protégée, with whom Lydia is accused of sleeping and who, we know, was blackballed from conducting jobs through the emails Lydia hurries to delete. Even before Krista’s death by suicide, she haunts Lydia: We see her long red hair in the audience for Lydia’s conversation with Adam Gopnik.

We’re led to believe she sends Lydia a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge —a book inspired by Sackville-West’s love affair with a woman who threatened suicide after their separation —which Lydia stuffs into the trash in an airplane bathroom. And just about an hour into the movie, as Lydia returns to her pied-à-terre after lunch with her mentor, look who’s waiting for her, tucked behind the piano:

In movie time, this is just as the cellist Olga arrives in Berlin for her audition, and riiiight about when Krista dies. It’s also about the time Lydia starts hearing mysterious noises, some explicable (a medical device in a nearby apartment), some not. Who set her metronome a-ticking? Who’s that knock, knock, knocking on her door? Who’s that scream, scream, screaming in the woods?

And then comes the visit to the young cellist Olga’s grotty Berlin apartment building, where, she says, she’s staying with friends. Bernstein and Harris are right, I think, to view this as a pivotal moment in the film. Lydia, waiting in her car, finds Olga’s little stuffed animal. Behind her we see Olga walking into the entrance of the building. A silver SUV drives past, and—

In the reverse shot, no time seems to have passed, but Olga has vanished, and Lydia is already out of her car. Observed now by a gently drifting handheld camera, Lydia walks through the passageway and into a courtyard full of trash, where she hears, far away, a woman singing. We follow Lydia on her descent down the stairs, into a dripping, poorly lit underworld of unoccupied rooms. Deeper and deeper she goes, the pitter-patter of little steps echoing behind her, making her glance over her shoulder again and again. And then she turns, and—

Is that the black dog of fate? The black dog of depression? An actual, literal dog—but freaking gigantic? Where has Olga gone? What is this infernal place? Is this a dream, or a horror movie, or is it Tarkovsky’s Stalker ? Lydia flees, and face-plants at the top of the stairs.

After her partner, Sharon, cleans up her face, Lydia gets up to comfort her daughter, Petra, in the middle of the night. And if you look closely, you’ll see, motionless in the dark corner of Lydia’s bedroom, nearly unnoticeable at the back of the frame, a red-haired woman: Krista.

We are no longer watching a movie whose style is that of, as Slate’s Dana Stevens put it, “cool, keenly observed detachment.” The movie has swerved, in these scenes, into the uncanny. Are we seeing Lydia’s dreams? Her greatest fears? Is she lying unconscious in a Berlin courtyard, her face being eaten by a giant black dog? Field never entirely reveals his hand, but the movie has transformed. Or perhaps another way to say it is that we’ve seen the movie injured, made just slightly shaky where once it was immaculately composed.

Lydia, too, is injured. Not just her face. Her right shoulder burns: “ Notalgia paraesthetica ,” her doctor diagnoses, which Lydia mishears as nostalgia . But perhaps the past is still with her, in some way: The nerve disorder notalgia paraesthetica presents as a phantom itch, an “ unreachable itch ,” not unlike the memory of one’s own guilt, or a sound you can’t unhear.

It’s that right arm, Lydia tells Adam Gopnik at the film’s beginning, that marks time. “Right from the first moment, I know exactly what time it is,” she says, with supreme confidence, “and the exact moment that you and I will arrive at our destination together.” In the film’s final act, Lydia loses that right arm, loses her confident control over time, and a film that was up till now conducted at adagietto , like the slow movement of Mahler’s Fifth, picks up.

A video of a charged encounter at Juilliard goes viral, oddly edited from multiple perspectives, even though no one in that rehearsal room seemed to have a phone out. A story in the New York Post accuses her of grooming multiple young women. Moderato. Her performance score for Mahler’s Fifth disappears without explanation. She loses the support of her foundation, her access to a private jet. Allegro. We are in Lydia Tár’s point of view now, in her subjective space, and all is unraveling with shocking speed, including possibly her mind. Protesters picket her poorly attended reading in New York. Olga abandons her at her hotel for someone more fun. Sharon kicks her out and withholds their daughter. She loses her position, loses her chance at the Fifth. Vivace. And now, somehow, we are backstage at the climactic performance, and somehow Lydia is there too, standing next to the trumpeter while he fanfares. He pays her no mind, not even as she rushes the stage, tackling the hack they’ve brought in to replace her.

More than one critic has noted how unusually melodramatic this moment seems. Maybe what they mean is that it’s unbelievable . And maybe we are not quite meant to believe it.

This is, after all, what she long dreamed would be the crowning moment in her career. It is for this sublime symphony that Lydia has worked, fought, seduced, acceded, betrayed, loved. And now a future exists in which she never has that opportunity, in which Mahler’s Fifth is missing from her career just like its score is from her shelf, all thanks to a ghost from her past. What might a glimpse of that possibility do to a mind like Lydia Tár’s? At a massage parlor in that unnamed Asian city, she stands before a chamber, the “fishbowl,” in which a score of young women await selection, an overt enactment of the subtle power dynamic Lydia has been taking advantage of for years. “You just pick a number,” the receptionist tells her. Who is the woman who, in that dreamlike moment, looks up, the woman who makes eye contact with Lydia and sends her into the street, retching?

No. 5. If it all seems too neat to be real, perhaps that’s because it is.

But what does it all mean ? What really happens? Is it all a dream? I admit that I don’t know, nor do I think Todd Field wants us to “know.” Tár isn’t a puzzle box, where the answer clicks into place at the end and we understand, at last, who Keyser Söze was. Think of this film, instead, as a journey through a haunted forest, like the ones the Grimms wrote about—like the one where Lydia hears that scream. We wend our way down ever-darker paths, becoming less and less certain what is real and what is not. By presenting the reality of Tár as increasingly subjective, Field is demanding that we question everything we see on that big screen, and receive the film as a mix of plot and psychology, incident and nightmare—all coming back around to the life, the dreams, and the fears of the incomparable Lydia Tár.

“The Five is a mystery,” she tells Gopnik in that same early conversation. Gopnik asks if she has a different interpretation of that symphony’s mystery than did her mentor, Leonard Bernstein. And Lydia responds with a reference to her ethnographic fieldwork in the Amazon, making a distinction about the relationship of the past to the future that I think matters for this interpretation of the film.

“The Shipibo-Conibo,” she says, referring to the tribe she studied—a real tribe, one known for the maze-like patterns on their pottery, replicated by Krista on the book she gave Lydia—“only receive an icaro , or song, if the singer is there on the same side of the spirit that created it. In that way the past and the present converge—the flip sides of the same cosmic coin.” She contrasts that belief with Bernstein’s belief in teshuvah —atonement, but also return : “the Talmudic power,” as she puts it, “to reach back in time and transform one’s past deeds.”

When Lydia Tár’s one chance at Mahler’s Fifth comes along, she will not be there to receive that song; she is, after all, no longer on the same side as the spirit that’s been haunting her. But neither can she imagine atoning, or transforming her past deeds. Perhaps what we see, in the avalanche of calamity that concludes this remarkable movie, is all that the monster can imagine instead.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘tár’ review: cate blanchett astounds in todd field’s blistering character study.

The two-time Oscar winner plays a composer-conductor whose reputation is suddenly shattered by revelations of her personal life in this caustic dissection of power dynamics playing in Venice competition.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

Share this article on Facebook
Share this article on Twitter
Share this article on Flipboard
Share this article on Email
Show additional share options
Share this article on Linkedin
Share this article on Pinit
Share this article on Reddit
Share this article on Tumblr
Share this article on Whatsapp
Share this article on Print
Share this article on Comment

Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tar in TAR.

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Hunter schafer faces horrors at german resort in neon’s ‘cuckoo’ trailer, minnie driver claims ‘hard rain’ producers denied her a wetsuit because “they wanted to see my nipples”, carla gugino says it was “physically totally impossible” that she played a mother in 2001’s ‘spy kids’, bambi goes on a rampage in first teaser for poohniverse movie ‘bambi: the reckoning’, ‘boiling point’ director philip barantini to helm dennis lehane adaptation ‘a bostonian’ (exclusive), ‘the first omen’ director arkasha stevenson says classic horror franchise has plenty of stories left.

Skip to main content
Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Threats, debt and Trump's advances: 'Stormy' doc examines the life of Stormy Daniels

Juliana Kim

Stormy Daniels from the Peacock documentary Stormy. NBCU hide caption

Stormy Daniels from the Peacock documentary Stormy.

The new documentary Stormy begins in 2023 — around the time former President Donald Trump was indicted over hush-money payments made during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Stormy Daniels, who was paid by Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen to keep quiet about their alleged previous affair, watches the news unfold on TV and then says, "Let's go," before she walks off screen.

Stormy Daniels says she's not yet 'vindicated' by Trump's indictment

Stormy chronicles Daniels' life from her childhood in Baton Rouge, La., to her rise as an adult film actor and then, in the opinion of some, a feminist hero. It also gives viewers a glimpse into how she went from friend to foe of a celebrity businessman who became president of the United States.

"I am here today to tell my story and even if I just change a few people's minds, it's fine. If not, at least my daughter can look back on this and know the truth," she said in the film.

Trump's criminal trial over the hush-money payments has been delayed until mid-April. He faces 34 felony counts, alleging he falsified New York business records to conceal damaging information before the 2016 presidential election. Trump denies the allegations that he had an affair with Daniels and has pleaded not guilty to all counts.

On Monday, a judge rejected Trump's bid to block Cohen and Daniels — whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford — from testifying. The trial date will be set at a hearing on March 25.

The film, released Monday on Peacock, mainly captures Daniels' life between 2018 and 2023. Here are the main takeaways from the documentary:

1. Daniels explains why she didn't say no to Trump's advances back in 2006

Daniels alleged that she was abused by a neighbor in Louisiana when she was 9 years old. She did not go into further detail except to say that the man, whom she did not name, had abused other young girls and has since died.

Manhattan prosecutors open to a 30-day delay in Trump's criminal trial

Later in the film, as Daniels explained why she did not refuse Trump's advances when the two met in 2006, she said, "I didn't say no because I just, I was 9 years old again." At the time, Daniels was in her 20s and Trump was 60.

Though she described the alleged affair as consensual, Daniels said she did not want to have sex with Trump.

"To this day, I blame myself and I have not forgiven myself because I didn't shut his a** down in that moment, so maybe make him pause before he tried it with someone else," she said. "The hardest part about all of this is I feel like I am partially responsible for every woman that could have come after me."

2. Threats against Daniels have become more disturbing

Throughout the film, Daniels is forced to navigate insults and threats hurled at her and her family.

But she described herself as having thick skin. In one scene from 2018, Daniels joked that she was disappointed she could not find any hate comments on Twitter after she had received a key to West Hollywood from the city's mayor.

Fast forward to this past year, after Trump's indictment, Daniels said the hate comments had become more intense and disturbing.

Trump Admits To Authorizing Stormy Daniels Payoff, Denies Sexual Encounter

"Back in 2018, there was stuff like 'liar, s***, gold digger,' " she said. "This time around, it is very different. It is direct threats. It is 'I'm going to come to your house and slit your throat.' "

Daniels added that she did not feel protected by the justice system, and accused it of ignoring her concerns about her safety.

3. Daniels says her 'soul is so tired' but she is willing to testify against Trump

Amid the six-year conflict with Trump, Daniels' marriage ended, her relationship with her daughter became strained, and she felt her safety was constantly jeopardized.

But with Trump about to go on trial, Daniels said she's willing to testify in court against the former president.

"I'm more prepared with my legal knowledge but I'm also tired. Like, my soul is so tired," she said. "I won't give up because I'm telling the truth. And I kind of don't even know if it matters anymore."

4. Daniels owes Trump over $600,000 in attorney fees

Near the end of the documentary, it's clear that Daniels also suffered financially as a result of her years-long legal battle against Trump.

In 2018, Daniels sued Trump for defamation. The suit was based on a tweet Trump wrote that year, which suggested Daniels had lied about being threatened in 2011 to not speak out about her alleged previous affair with Trump.

A federal judge later dismissed the suit and ordered Daniels to pay the then-president's legal fees.

Stormy Daniels Ordered To Pay Trump $293,000 In Fees In Defamation Lawsuit

Daniels appealed but lost. She now owes Trump over $600,000 in attorney fees. The film asserts that Daniels is afraid she may lose her home.

5. Seth Rogen and Jimmy Kimmel speak on Daniels' behalf

Among the people who appeared in the documentary were actor Seth Rogen and late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel.

Rogen, who worked with Daniels on the 2007 film Knocked Up , recalled talking with her about Trump. At the time, Daniels said she was communicating with Trump about possibly being on his former reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice .

"She didn't realize she would one day be at the center of this giant thing as she was messing around with some game show host," Rogen said. "She's someone who made an enemy of the most powerful guy on the planet and didn't, like, cower."

The Two-Way

Stormy daniels, other stars guest in 'snl' cold open.

Kimmel invited Daniels to his show in 2018, when Daniels' nondisclosure agreement about her previous affair with Trump was still in effect.

Kimmel described Daniels as having a good sense of humor but also afraid of violating her NDA. He nodded to this during their interview, in which he brought out puppets to reenact her interactions with Trump.

"She told the truth and she paid a price for that," Kimmel said in the film. "It's not something that just goes away."

IMAGES

'Tár' review: Cate Blanchett stars a manipulative classical conductor : NPR
'Tár' review: Cate Blanchett is thrillingly alive in her role as Lydia
TÁR Review: Cate Blanchett Conducts an Acting Master Class
In 'TÁR,' Cate Blanchett portrays a genius conductor who's off tempo in
Tar (2022)
{Movie Review} Tar (2020)

VIDEO

Marty punches Biff (he really deserved it)
Shaitan Movie 14 Day Box Office Collaction, Shaitan Movie Trailer, Ajay Devgan, R madhavan, Jyotika
Kalki 2898 AD film kannada update// Kalki film kannada update #kalki2898 #prabhas #kannada
The scariest filter. Funny part 01
Jawan Movie Public Review
CHAAVER Malayalam Movie Theater Response

COMMENTS

Movie Review: Tár : NPR
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part ...
'Tár' review: Cate Blanchett stars a manipulative classical ...
Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned conductor in the film Tár. Courtesy of Focus Features. By this point, we don't need any reminders of what a great actor Cate Blanchett is, but we have one ...
Movie Review: Tár
Movie Review: Tár. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part, he would not have made the movie. Critic Bob Mondello says the filmmaker's faith in his star is well placed.
'Tár' director Todd Field and actor Cate Blanchett on the film's ...
Cate Blanchett plays a charismatic conductor who uses her power to take sexual advantage of young women she's mentoring. Both Blanchett and Tár director Todd Field have been nominated for Oscars.
'Tar' tracks the fictional unraveling of a celebrated orchestra ...
Listen · 6:21. 6-Minute Listen. Playlist. Download. Embed. Transcript. NPR's Scott Simon talks with Todd Field about his new film "Tar", which tracks the fictional unraveling of one of the world ...
Movie Review: Tár
Movie Review: Tár. By Bob Mondello. Published October 7, 2022 at 3:17 PM CDT. Listen • 3:49. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part, he would not have made the movie.
TÁR movie review & film summary (2022)
TÁR. Throughout the new film written and directed by Todd Field, its title character, a person of exceptionally sensitive hearing and possibly perfect pitch, is almost constantly distracted from her vital activities by extraneous noise. The noises include a doorbell, or something like a doorbell, dinging—our title character, Lydia Tár ...
'Tár' Review: A Maestro Faces the Music
Movie data powered by IMDb.com A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine.
Movie Review: Tár
Listen • 3:49. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed ...
Cate Blanchett Is Imperious and Incandescent in "Tár"
She has a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—the royal flush of accolades. It's true that she happens to be a fictional character, incarnated by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field's new movie ...
Review
October 12, 2022 at 9:42 a.m. EDT. Cate Blanchett, left, in "Tár." (Focus Features) ( 4 stars) Behold Lydia Tár: lithe and silkily glamorous as a Saluki, an intricately coiled helix of ...
Movie Review: Tár
The film Tár is at once a meditation on a celebrated woman who abuses her stardom, and a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett.
'Tár' Review: Cate Blanchett in Todd Field's Masterful ...
'Tár' Review: Cate Blanchett Acts With Ferocious Force in Todd Field's Masterful Drama Reviewed at Dolby 88 (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.
Movie Review: Tár
Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't agreed to play the part, he would not have ...
Movie Review: Tár
The film Tár is at once a meditation on a celebrated woman who abuses her stardom, and a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett.
'Tár': Cate Blanchett's Staggering Work of Complicated Genius
Fields is not in it for the easy schadenfreude, either way. Nor is Blanchett, who, more than anything else at play, is the essence of what makes Tár work. It's a masterful, full-bodied ...
Tár
From writer-producer-director Todd Field comes TÁR, starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, the groundbreaking conductor of a major German Orchestra. We meet Tár at the height of her career, as ...
Movie Review: Tár
Movie Review: Tár. JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: Writer-director Todd Field conceived his new movie, "Tar," about a symphony conductor, with Cate Blanchett in mind. In fact, Field says, if she hadn't ...
Tár review
Tár is imagined to be principal conductor of a major German orchestra, addressed by colleagues as "maestro". She is passionate, demanding, autocratic, with a rockstar prestige and an ...
TÁR review: Cate Blanchett stuns in the classical music drama
The vectors of ego, talent, and personal liability collide in Todd Field's TÁR, a towering monolith of a movie rooted in an extraordinary, shattering performance by Cate Blanchett. She is Lydia ...
Tar movie ending: Everyone's reading the Cate Blanchett movie all wrong
By Dan Kois. Dec 08, 20225:50 AM. Focus Features. Lots of writers and critics disagree about Tár, Todd Field's film starring Cate Blanchett as an art monster and orchestral conductor whose past ...
'Tár' Review: Cate Blanchett Astounds in Todd Field's Blistering
Release date: Friday, Oct. 7. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Mark Strong. Director-screenwriter: Todd Field. 2 hours 38 minutes. Any ...
Movie Reviews : NPR
March 22, 2024 • The 1989 movie Road House starred Patrick Swayze as a no-nonsense bouncer who saves a honky-tonk bar from a local toughs. Now, in the new remake, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a former ...
Movies: Movie Reviews and Commentary on New and Classic Films
March 22, 2024 • The 1989 movie Road House starred Patrick Swayze as a no-nonsense bouncer who saves a honky-tonk bar from a local toughs. Now, in the new remake, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a former ...
'La Chimera' review: This Italian fable features a magical movie ...
The wonderful 42-year-old filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher practices a kind of cinema that I've come to think of as "Italian magical neorealism." She gives us portraits of hard-scrabble lives in poor ...
Fresh Air for April 2, 2024: The mental health crisis impacting kids : NPR
Movie Reviews 'La Chimera' is marvelous — right up to its most magical ending. An archeological tomb robber wanders Italy, haunted by the memory of lost love.
'3 Body Problem' review: Alien invasion cripples science in new Netflix
The new Netflix series brings to life a sprawling, successful Chinese novel outlining a new kind of alien invasion. Above, Zine Tseng in 3 Body Problem. Maria Heras/Netflix hide caption
'Oppenheimer' premieres in Japan : NPR
The film's release in Japan, more than eight months after it opened in the U.S., had been watched with trepidation because of the sensitivity of the subject matter.
'STEVE!' review: Steve Martin doc on Apple TV+ spotlights a ...
One moment, he's describing his father's reaction to his first big movie, 1979's The Jerk ("Well, he's no Charlie Chaplin," Glenn Martin said to his son at dinner after the premiere).
'Stormy': 5 takeaways from the new documentary on Stormy Daniels
Stormy chronicles Daniels' life from her childhood in Baton Rouge, La., to her rise as an adult film actor and then, in the opinion of some, a feminist hero. It also gives viewers a glimpse into ...

Movie Review: Tár

Movie Review: Tár

Movie Reviews

Glenn Kenny

Now playing

Asleep in My Palm

Brian Tallerico

The American Society of Magical Negroes

Love Lies Bleeding

Peyton Robinson

God Save Texas

Cinematographer

Latest blog posts

The People’s Joker and Six Other Films That Were Stuck in Legal Limbo

Metrograph Highlights Remarkable Career of Lee Chang-dong

Female Filmmakers in Focus: Alice Rohrwacher on La Chimera

On Luca, Tenet, The Invisible Man and Other Films from the Early Pandemic Era that Deserve More Big-Screen Time

‘Tár’ Review: A Maestro Faces the Music

Explore More in TV and Movies

Movie Review: Tár

You make NHPR possible.

Baton Charge

New Yorker Favorites

‘Tár’: A seductive deep dive into a woman’s unraveling psyche

NCPR Podcasts

More podcasts from NPR

More from NPR

‘Tár’ Review: Cate Blanchett Acts With Ferocious Force in Todd Field’s Masterful Drama

Owen Gleiberman

Reviewed at Dolby 88 (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 22, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.

More From Our Brands

Movie Review: Tár

Movie Review: Tár

‘Tár’: Cate Blanchett’s Staggering Work of Complicated Genius

K. Austin Collins

Editor’s picks

'I Don't Look for Roles That I Can Ham It Up': A Conversation with Walton Goggins

Stephen Colbert Spotlights World Central Kitchen Deaths: 'This Is Not an Isolated Incident'

'Ripley' Lets the Talented Mr. Andrew Scott Lead an Incredible Remake

Filmmaker John Ridley, ABC, and Disney Named as Defendants in Discrimination Lawsuit

Most Popular

Verify it's you

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Email not verified

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Movies / TV

What to know

You might also like

Rate And Review

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

How did you buy your ticket?

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Cast & Crew

News & Interviews for Tár

Critic Reviews for Tár

Movie & TV guides

Movie Review: Tár

👋 Looks like you could use more news. Sign up for our newsletters.

Tár review – Cate Blanchett is perfect lead in delirious, sensual drama

Comments (…)

TÁR review: Cate Blanchett is her own symphony in a sublime, unsettling drama

Related Articles

Tár Is the Most-Talked-About Movie of the Year. So Why Is Everyone Talking About It All Wrong?

Sign up for the Slate Culture Newsletter

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

site categories

David Rooney

Related Stories

Full credits

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Threats, debt and Trump's advances: 'Stormy' doc examines the life of Stormy Daniels

Stormy Daniels says she's not yet 'vindicated' by Trump's indictment

1. Daniels explains why she didn't say no to Trump's advances back in 2006

Manhattan prosecutors open to a 30-day delay in Trump's criminal trial

2. Threats against Daniels have become more disturbing

Trump Admits To Authorizing Stormy Daniels Payoff, Denies Sexual Encounter

3. Daniels says her 'soul is so tired' but she is willing to testify against Trump

4. Daniels owes Trump over $600,000 in attorney fees

Stormy Daniels Ordered To Pay Trump $293,000 In Fees In Defamation Lawsuit

5. Seth Rogen and Jimmy Kimmel speak on Daniels' behalf