Tár Review

Field's method is to withhold the film's own opinion, which is why the Juilliard sequence plays as a fair fight and an act of bullying at once, in a single unbroken take that gives Lydia Tar every rhetorical advantage and then lets us notice how she uses it. The film is unusually literate about how power actually operates inside an institution: not through decrees but through calendars, seating, letters of recommendation and who is permitted to be tired.

Cate Blanchett does something more difficult than a portrait of villainy, playing a woman whose artistic seriousness is real and whose cruelty runs on the same engine. Nina Hoss holds the marriage together with almost nothing on the page. The sound design is the second lead, since Tar is hunted by noises she cannot control, and Hildur Gudnadottir's sparse score refuses to tell us how to feel about any of it. The final act's descent leans on satire broader than what came before, and the Mahler material asks a great deal of patience. It remains the most exacting film about a working artist in years.