Tár is a 2022 psychological drama film written and directed by Todd Field. Cate Blanchett stars as Lydia Tár, a world-renowned conductor, whose life unravels after she is accused of misconduct. The supporting cast includes Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, and Mark Strong.
Tár premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival in September 2022, where Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. Following a three-week limited theatrical release, it received a wide release on October 28, 2022, through Focus Features. It received acclaim, especially for Blanchett's performance and Field's screenplay and direction. At the 95th Academy Awards, it garnered six nominations, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director for Field, and Best Actress for Blanchett.
Tár was the fourth film to be named Best of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the London Film Critics' Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. It has appeared in numerous lists of the greatest films of the 21st century.
Plot Lydia Tár, chief conductor of a Berlin orchestra, heavily relies on Francesca, her personal assistant and confidante. While being interviewed by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker Festival, Lydia promotes her upcoming live recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and memoir Tár on Tár. She meets with Eliot Kaplan, an investment banker and amateur conductor who co-founded the Accordion Foundation with Lydia to support aspiring female conductors. They discuss technique, replacing Lydia's assistant conductor Sebastian with Francesca, and filling a vacant cello position in Berlin.
As a guest lecturer, Lydia holds a masterclass at Juilliard. When a student expresses reluctance to study Bach due to his social views, she encourages him to focus on composers' music rather than their personal lives. The student leaves in frustration. That night, Lydia anonymously receives a first edition of Vita Sackville-West's novel Challenge with the title page embellished with a hand-drawn kené pattern, a personal reminder of her trip to Peru. She tears up the page and throws it away.
Lydia flies back to Berlin, where she lives with her wife Sharon, the concertmaster of the orchestra, and their daughter Petra. Before a blind audition for the cello position, Lydia spots a young Russian candidate, Olga Metkina, in the bathroom. Lydia changes her scorecard to ensure Olga a spot in the orchestra and proposes to the orchestra that Elgar's Cello Concerto be the companion piece to the Mahler symphony, virtually guaranteeing Olga the soloist position. Lydia's attraction to Olga strains her relationships with Francesca and Sharon.
Krista Taylor, a promising young musician whom Lydia once mentored, has been blacklisted after a dispute with Lydia. After sending disturbing emails to Francesca, Krista ends her own life. Lydia instructs Francesca to delete the emails and hire a lawyer after learning of Krista's parents' plan to sue her. Lydia informs Sebastian of his imminent replacement. Incensed, he calls her out on her inappropriate favoritism, leading Lydia to decide against promoting Francesca.
Lydia is haunted by an increasing sensitivity to sound, surreal nightmares, daytime hallucinations, chronic pain, and enigmatic patterned scribbles resembling those Krista once made. While trying to complete a composition dedicated to Petra, she is disturbed by the sound of a medical device next door, where her neighbor is caring for her dying mother. One day, Lydia falls and hurts herself while attempting to follow Olga home, but tells Sharon she was injured in a mugging.
A manipulatively edited video of Lydia's Juilliard class goes viral, and an article accusing her of sexual predation appears in the New York Post. Lydia's Wikipedia page is also edited by an unseen person to include the controversial new information about her. Lydia tries to contact Francesca, who resigned after being denied the promotion. She breaks into Francesca's home and finds a draft of Tár on Tár, which Francesca has renamed Rat on Rat. Lydia, accompanied by Olga, returns to New York City to attend a deposition for Krista's parents' lawsuit and to promote her book. The two are met by protestors, and Lydia is confronted with incriminating emails between her and Krista that Francesca provided.
In Berlin, Lydia is removed as conductor due to the controversy. Furious over the allegations and Lydia's lack of transparency, Sharon bars her from seeing their daughter. An increasingly depressed and deranged Lydia retreats to her old studio. She sneaks into the live recording she was supposed to conduct, and runs onto the stage to assault Eliot, who replaced her as conductor. Advised to remain out of the public eye by her management, she returns to her modest childhood home on Staten Island, where she finds certificates of achievement bearing her birth name, Linda Tarr. She cries watching an old VHS of Young People's Concerts in which Leonard Bernstein discusses the meaning of music. Her brother Tony arrives and admonishes her for forgetting her roots.
Sometime in the future, Lydia finds work conducting in the Philippines. Seeking a massage, the hotel concierge sends her to a brothel fronting as a massage parlor; the young women sit in a semicircle with numbers on their robes. Number 5 looks directly at Lydia, who rushes outside to vomit. Later, she conducts a live performance of the score for the video game series Monster Hunter in front of an audience of cosplayers.
Cast
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, a world-famous composer–conductor Noémie Merlant as Francesca Lentini, Lydia's assistant Nina Hoss as Sharon Goodnow, a concertmaster and Lydia's wife Sophie Kauer as Olga Metkina, a young Russian cellist Julian Glover as Andris Davis, Lydia's predecessor Allan Corduner as Sebastian Brix, Lydia's assistant conductor Mark Strong as Eliot Kaplan, an investment banker, amateur conductor, and manager of Lydia's fellowship program Adam Gopnik as himself, Lydia's interviewer at The New Yorker Festival Sylvia Flote as Krista Taylor, a former member of Lydia's fellowship program Sydney Lemmon as Whitney Reese, a fan of Lydia Zethphan Smith-Gneist as Max, a Juilliard student Alec Baldwin (voice only) as himself, interviewing Lydia on his podcast Here's the Thing Mila Bogojevic as Petra, Lydia and Sharon's daughter Lee Sellars as Tony, Lydia's brother
Production
It was announced in April 2021 that Blanchett would star in the film, which would be written and directed by Todd Field, with production set to begin in September 2021. In a statement accompanying the teaser trailer in August 2022, Field said that he wrote the script for Blanchett, and that he would not have made the film if she had declined it. In September 2021, Nina Hoss and Noémie Merlant joined the cast, and Hildur Guðnadóttir became the film's composer.
In an interview with The Guardian in October, Mark Strong revealed that he had finished filming scenes for the film. In November, it was reported that filming was taking place in Berlin, with Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner and Sylvia Flote joining the cast. (Kauer is a British-German classical cellist who studied at the Royal Academy of Music.) All diegetic music was recorded live on-set, including Blanchett's piano playing, Kauer's cello, and the Dresden Philharmonic's performances.
Music
The conductor John Mauceri was as a consultant on Field's script, helping inform the tenor and accuracy of Lydia Tár's comments on classical music and musicians. Hildur Guðnadóttir composed the original score, although other music was also included, including classical music by Gustav Mahler and Edward Elgar. Over 30 tracks are featured.
A concept album featuring 20 tracks, titled Tár (Music from and Inspired By the Motion Picture) was released on October 21, 2022. It includes Guðnadóttir's score with the London Contemporary Orchestra, and a rehearsal of Mahler's Fifth Symphony with Blanchett conducting the Dresden Philharmonic, as well as new music by Guðnadóttir.
For the week ending November 5, 2022, the Tár concept album topped Billboard magazine's Traditional Classical Albums chart at number one. In December 2022, Guðnadóttir's score was ruled ineligible for Oscar consideration, as there was not enough original, audible music, and also because it did not fulfill the rule that "a score shall not be eligible if it has been diluted by the use of pre-existing music".
Release Tár had its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 1, 2022, and had its first North American screening at the 49th Telluride Film Festival on September 3, 2022. It had a limited theatrical release on October 7, 2022, then expanded to wide release on October 28.
The film was released for VOD on November 15, 2022, followed by a Blu-ray, DVD, and 4K UHD release on December 20. By March 9, 2023, according to Samba TV, the film had been streamed on Peacock in 458,000 households in the US since the Oscar nomination announcement on January 24. JustWatch also reported it to be, by February 21, the third most-streamed Best Picture nominee in Canada. In the UK, BBC 2 broadcast Tár nationwide on the 14 September 2025, with a reduced running time of 150 minutes.
Reception Box office Tár grossed $6.8 million in the United States and Canada, and $22.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $29.2 million. In the United States and Canada, it made $158,620 from four theaters in its opening weekend. The $39,655 per-screen average was the second highest of 2022 for a limited release. In its second weekend the film made $330,030 from 36 theaters. In its third weekend it made $500,035 from 141 theaters, and there was speculation in the trades that Tár was an example that there was still a place for "adult-minded fare". However, once Tár expanded to 1,087 theaters in its fourth weekend, leaving the limited specialty house run for the multiplex, it made only $1.02 million, finishing 10th. Audiences surveyed by PostTrak over the weekend gave the film a 72% positive score, with 42% saying they would definitely recommend it. In its second week of wide release, it made $729,605 (marking a drop of 30%).
Some commentators attributed the poor US domestic box office performance to the film's subject matter alienating a general audience. Others noted a larger trend in US art houses, 40% of which had permanently shuttered during the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling to regain their core 40–70-year-old audience, an audience more prone to health concerns and still hesitant to return to the cinema. The New York Times reported that Tár "cost at least $35 million including marketing" and that it and similar highbrow films from established filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans had "failed to find an audience big enough to justify their costs". 78% of the film's box office takings were overseas.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of 361 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads, "Led by the soaring melody of Cate Blanchett's note-perfect performance, Tár riffs brilliantly on the discordant side of fame-fueled power." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 93 out of 100, based on 60 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Owen Gleiberman in his Venice Film Festival Daily Variety review wrote:
A. O. Scott of The New York Times writing from the Telluride Film Festival and later from the New York Film Festival stated:
Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times regarded the film as:
Alissa Wilkinson, writing for Vox, observed:
Reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney wrote:
Anthony Lane of The New Yorker stated: