nyt movie review of tar

Review: Cate Blanchett is at the peak of her powers in ‘Tár,’ a magnificent cinematic symphony

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It’s not until an hour into “Tár” that we see the title character — a classical conductor known the world over as Lydia Tár and played by an unimprovable Cate Blanchett — do what she was born to do. It’s an astonishing performance nestled inside another: In one shot, Lydia towers like a colossus over the podium and the camera, her face visible only to the musicians seated off-screen, her arms spread wide as if she were embracing or perhaps possessing the world. Classical music buffs, who will have a particular field day with this movie, will also have sharper observations than mine on the merits of Blanchett’s posture and baton technique. But this actor doesn’t even need to lift a baton, or approach a podium, to make us feel we’re in the presence of a singularly gifted musical body and mind.

A lesser movie — and one of the weird pleasures of “Tár” is that you can’t stop imagining the lesser movie it so easily might have been — would have introduced Lydia in full-blown maestro mode, so as to convince us of her genius at the outset. But writer-director Todd Field takes that genius as a given and trusts we’ll do the same; he respects the intelligence of the audience as surely as he does the magnificence of his star. And that respect is clear from the long, teasing reveal of an opening sequence: an onstage Q&A moderated by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (playing himself) that ushers us, with tasteful chuckles and radio-smooth applause, into Lydia’s rarefied cultural sphere.

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Gopnik rattles off an impressively varied (and deftly expository) list of Lydia’s professional accomplishments: not just all the prestigious orchestras she’s conducted but also the honors she’s received as a pianist, a composer, a teacher, an author, a scholar of Peruvian Indigenous music and a rare overachiever whose work straddles music, television, movies and theater. (Yes, she’s an EGOT winner .)

For the record:

11:50 a.m. Oct. 7, 2022 An earlier version of this review incorrectly gave conductor Nadia Boulanger’s name as Natalia.

Lydia, casually resplendent in a simple black suit and open-necked white shirt, takes a moment to register all this praise before gently deflecting it. She describes her love for her heroes like Mahler and Leonard Bernstein, and she positions herself in a small, proud tradition of female conductors, including Nadia Boulanger and Antonia Brico. There’s a ticklish note of meta-pleasure to Blanchett’s performance: She may be playing the role of the conductor with impeccable poise, but so, of course, is Lydia herself.

The ability to perform greatness is itself a key component of greatness, as this pretty great movie knows. So is the illusion of approachability: In her self-deprecating asides and post-Q&A chitchat, Lydia extends the audience-flattering notion that we could even begin to understand what she does. She can describe, with breathtaking precision and self-assurance, the beauty of a composition or the methodology behind her hand movements. But what distinguishes “Tár” from so many good and bad movies about artists is its understanding that what we tidily refer to as genius — call it some elusive distillation of star quality, technical skill, intellectual acumen and pure, nervy instinct — can never truly be known, let alone filmed. It can only really be imagined.

And now Field, bringing a 16-year absence from filmmaking to a well-deserved end, has imagined Lydia’s inner and outer worlds with a clarity and rigor that makes 158 minutes fly by like a dream. If “time is the essential piece of interpretation,” as Lydia claims early on, then this filmmaker’s own mastery of cinematic time is worth singling out. So, for that matter, are the cool, somber precision of Florian Hoffmeister’s images, the fluidity of Monika Willi’s editing and the sleek, luxurious chill of Marco Bittner Rosser’s production design. If there’s a reason this movie flows so absorbingly, even with its decidedly andante pacing, it may be that Field’s storytelling draws no artificial distinction between the big and the small, the important and the mundane; everything we see and hear matters. And because each moment serves at least two purposes — “Tár” is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

If there’s a governing logic to the story, it’s that in nearly every scene, Lydia is performing, and in every performance, she’ll reveal something she didn’t necessarily intend. That’s true whether she’s having an obligatory drink with a deep-pocketed investor (an oily Mark Strong) or teaching at Juilliard, where she cruelly humiliates a student, Max (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist), in a virtuoso extended monologue. Lydia’s performing doesn’t end when she leaves New York and returns home to Germany, where she serves as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic — another role she plays with note-perfect skill, captivating her colleagues and underlings with her dry, affable wit and unyielding authority.

For if Lydia is always performing, then she is also always conducting, ruthlessly directing, coordinating, manipulating and sometimes hushing the people in her life as if they were members of her own personal orchestra. Some of them, like Lydia’s bumbling assistant conductor (Allan Corduner) and aging, long-retired mentor (Julian Glover), are granted a brief, beautifully performed solo.

The most poignant of these comes from Sharon (the superb Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s first-chair violinist and Lydia’s longtime partner, with whom she shares a gorgeously cavernous apartment and a young daughter. Hoss, whose quiet, sympathetic gaze can register even the subtlest shifts in emotional temperature, here sublimates her star persona in much the same way that Sharon represses her own needs. She knows the emotional sacrifices she’s made to live with — and nurture — a celebrity.

That means turning a blind eye to some of Lydia’s less savory secrets, the concealment of which largely falls to an ambitious personal assistant, Francesca (a cunning Noémie Merlant, from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” ). The details of Lydia’s indiscretions are left ambiguous, but the conclusions we can draw from them are almost banally matter-of-fact. As various lovely young women slip on and off Lydia’s radar — a conducting student she’s abruptly ghosted, a prodigiously talented Russian cellist (Sophie Kauer) — “Tár” becomes a coolly modulated study in the abuse of power and the predatory impulses of the famous and influential, even in an era when emails, Wikipedia entries and TikTok videos carry ever greater threats of public exposure.

Lydia, with her deep reverence for centuries-old musical traditions, is predictably oblivious to these modern technological pitfalls and blindsided by the looming prospect of her own comeuppance. But in other respects, she is an extraordinarily perceptive instrument. Blanchett emphasizes Lydia’s acute sensitivity to sound, whether she’s hushing someone’s nervous physical tic or picking up on eerie disturbances in her apartment late at night. Is someone stalking her and her family, or is her guilt at her past misdeeds finally catching up with her? “Tár” isn’t a horror movie, exactly, but at times its unnerving psychological tension reminded me of the chilly, often Schubert-rich films of Michael Haneke (particularly “The Piano Teacher” ), who likes to lay bare the moral cowardice and guilty desires often lurking beneath lives of upper-middle-class privilege.

Field may not be as exacting a formalist or as rigorous a sadist as Haneke, but as he demonstrated in his previous dramas, “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children,” he has his own flair for jolting his characters out of their complacency. In “Tár,” Lydia is partly undone by her defiance of the shifting cultural winds in the overlapping spheres of music, industry and academia she occupies. As a rare woman and a rare lesbian in a male-dominated profession, she’s undoubtedly a trailblazer, though like so many well-established figureheads, she’s also an ardent defender of the status quo. She sneers at diversity initiatives, downplays gender barriers and insists that identity politics — what she calls “the narcissism of small differences” — have no place in the evaluation of art.

“Don’t be so quick to be offended,” she lectures that student, Max, who expresses distaste for the legacies of Bach, Beethoven and other canonized white male composers. And whether you see Lydia as some sort of brave antiwoke crusader or out-of-touch reactionary, Blanchett makes it hard not to savor the ruthlessness — or the dazzling intellectual brio — with which she dismantles Max’s position (all while playing the opening prelude of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” to boot).

But if “Tár” pokes at a few discourse-friendly thought bubbles like “#MeToo” and “cancel culture” — and drops a few knowing references to disgraced musicians like Plácido Domingo and James Levine — it’s much too smart and slippery to be reduced to them. Rejecting the comforts of moral absolutism and easy outrage, Field holds Lydia Tár the magnificent artist and Lydia Tár the monstrous human being side by side — and insists that the two might, in fact, be inextricably, even symbiotically connected.

Great art thrives, we’re often told, on the transgression of boundaries, moral as well as aesthetic. While Lydia gets called a lot of nasty names, “f—ing bitch” included, it’s telling that her own favorite insult is “robot,” as if a rule-minding automaton, or a human metronome, were the worst thing a person could be. What makes “Tár” so bracingly honest is the extent to which it agrees with her. Its tone, coolly understated but not exactly neutral, leaves room for exasperation and admiration alike. This may be a morality play about a powerful woman’s downfall, but there is something about Field and Blanchett’s refusal to abandon Lydia at her lowest ebb that subverts the usual dramatic apparatus of crime and punishment.

The movie’s ending is both darkly funny and disquietingly ambiguous, not because of any real confusion as to what’s happening but because it refuses to instruct us how we should feel about it. My own awe at Lydia Tár — and as loathsome as she is, I haven’t loved many movie characters more this year — inclines me toward the more optimistic of two possible readings. I also can’t shake the conviction that, the depths of her corruption and cruelty notwithstanding, she bears the unmistakable joint imprint of the two geniuses who breathed her into being. Lydia is and always has been a tirelessly prolific and inventive artist, a giant of the medium that chose her. And she may also, against considerable odds, have a triumphant return up her sleeve.

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Rating: R, for some language and brief nudity Running time: 2 hours, 38 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 7, AMC the Grove, Los Angeles; AMC Century City

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“Tár,” Reviewed: Regressive Ideas to Match Regressive Aesthetics

By Richard Brody

The conductor James Levine was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 following accusations that he had sexually abused four men—students of his—three of them when they were teen-agers. The conductor Charles Dutoit resigned his post with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that same year after he was accused of sexual assault by several women. (Both men denied the accusations.) In Todd Field’s film “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár, both men are mentioned, by an elderly male retired conductor, as objects of his sympathy. This peripheral character’s remark should hardly be taken for the writer and director’s point of view—except that the drama is centered on accusations of improprieties levied against Lydia and presents her as a victim. The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations that she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy. Moreover, it depicts her as the victim of another attack, one that is based on blatant falsehoods, but that, in the wake of the other accusations, gains traction in the media.

“Tár” is a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics. It presents Lydia as an artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment—which is, in turn, confirmed and even improved under that influence. It presents the efforts to expand the world of classical music to become more inclusive, by way of commissioning and presenting new music by a wider range of composers, as somewhere between a self-sacrificing gesture of charity and utterly pointless. It mocks the concept of the blind audition (intended to prevent gatekeeping conductors, musicians, and administrators from making decisions on the basis of appearance). It sneers at the presumption of an orchestra to self-govern (which the one that Lydia unmistakably conducts in the film, the Berlin Philharmonic, does in real life). It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a BIPOC pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.

Lydia’s backstory—of a sanitized, résumé-like sort—is dispensed in the movie’s first long scene, a New Yorker -centric one, featuring my colleague Adam Gopnik, as himself, interviewing Lydia onstage for The New Yorker Festival. He introduces her by way of a litany of her achievements: conducting posts with the great orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York, a background in ethnomusicology and the music of Indigenous peoples, a repertory that involves commissioning music from female composers and performing it alongside venerable classical works, even an EGOT . As Gopnik recites her bona fides, her assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who obviously compiled them, silently lip-synchs along offstage.

Lydia is married to Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s concertmaster, a relationship that began around the time of Lydia’s appointment to the group’s leadership. They live, with their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), in a Brutalist apartment of a pristine monumentality (though Lydia keeps her old place, in an old building, to work in). Lydia is the co-founder of a program to mentor aspiring young female conductors. Francesca, one of her former students, works tirelessly as Lydia’s factotum, amanuensis, and personal assistant, in the expectation of becoming her assistant conductor in Berlin. Another former student, Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), is seemingly stalking Lydia, who has meanwhile been thwarting Krista’s career by dissuading orchestra administrators from hiring her. There’s the hint that Lydia had had sexual relationships with both Francesca and Krista—but only a hint, and enough calculated vagueness to leave viewers debating in the lobby.

“Tár” is a useful reminder of the connection between regressive ideas and regressive aesthetics. It’s also a useful illustration of the fact that there is no such thing as “the story,” no preëxisting set of events that inherently define a character’s life, rise, or fall. This movie, launching the action with the barest of hints that Krista is the bringer of trouble to paradise, does almost as good a job at effacing the specifics of whatever may have gone on between them as Lydia herself does of deleting Krista’s incriminating e-mails. (One hint of the nature of their relationship is an anonymous gift—a signed copy of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge,” based on the author’s romantic relationship with a woman who attempts to die by suicide—that Lydia tears and discards.)

The movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown. It identifies so closely with her perspective that it even depicts several of her dreams—yet, despite getting inside her head, Field can’t be bothered to show what she knows of her relationships with two of the key characters in the film; he doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t). By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it.

This movie about an artist’s life and work is, for the most part, utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered. It delivers a few superficial details regarding Lydia’s effort to interpret the piece at the core of the film, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in terms of the composer’s biography. As for new music, Lydia may commission it and conduct it, she may exhort Max to discover the feelings in it, but the movie never shows what Lydia herself does with it or finds in it. The best moments in the film are the few, of a quasi-documentary import, in which Lydia, in rehearsal with the orchestra, exhorts and directs the musicians in fine points of phrasing and other expressive details.

Yet the music itself is filmed with an absence of style. Not a single image of the orchestra at work has a visual melody or a contrapuntal density, and the filming of performance seems borrowed from any DVD of a symphony orchestra. (By contrast, see Edgar Ulmer’s filming of the real-life conductor Leopold Stokowski and the musicians of his orchestra in the 1947 film “ Carnegie Hall .”) The conducting gestures that Lydia makes, her expressions while conducting, are laughable, not because Blanchett’s performance is in any way ridiculous but because Field’s awkward, lumpish images make it appear so. In a climactic scene, in which Lydia gives vent to her largely stifled rage against her perceived persecution, she emerges from the wings of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall to the sound of the opening trumpet call of Mahler’s Fifth, which Field turns into the equivalent of a baseball player’s walk-on music .

The movie is no less obtuse regarding the artistic side of the power plays and the personal relationships that go into the making of music. A young cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), whom Lydia chooses on the basis of attraction to her, in stealthy defiance of the blind audition, turns out to be a gifted musician whose particular talents Lydia pushes to the fore (with a planned performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto). Far from alienating the somewhat bewildered orchestra, Olga soon wins their admiration. Moreover, the prime beneficiary of the accusations against Lydia (significantly, relegated to the gossipy New York Post ) is a conductor of lesser talent, a boardroom-friendly art bureaucrat (and a funder of her mentorship program), Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong). The one moving aspect of the offstage lives of musicians involves the fear of exposure that queer musicians endured, the deformation of their private lives by the pressure to maintain secrecy, and Lydia’s confession about the career-threatening troubles that she and Sharon endured when they made their relationship public. Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

The careful ambiguities of “Tár” offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow. The film is constructed as a series of scenes that cut from one place to another, even jumping ahead just a few minutes or hours, and the characterization of Lydia Tár is similarly disjointed. Blanchett’s performance doesn’t suffice: she incarnates each moment sharply and emphatically but, despite her supremely skillful exertions, Field doesn’t forge dramatic unity. The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all. “Tár” digests great art, and high-flown talk about it, into a smooth and superficial package. It’s as far from the great art of movies as most movie scores are from a Mahler symphony. ♦

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By Alex Ross

• Entertainment
• Venice Review: In <i>Tár,</i> Cate Blanchett Gives a Dazzling Performance as an Orchestra Conductor on the Edge

Venice Review: In Tár, Cate Blanchett Gives a Dazzling Performance as an Orchestra Conductor on the Edge

A s many a printed tote bag reminds us, well-behaved women rarely make history. But what does that mean, exactly? There’s a tendency to romanticize the idea of the complicated woman, as if that adjective were an automatic badge of honor. Does it mean a woman is intelligent, independent or brave? Or is she merely unbearable? And what man ever gets praised for being “complicated”?

In writer-director Todd Field’s dazzling, uncompromising high-wire act Tár —playing at the 79 Venice Film Festival— Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár, a conductor at the top of her game, and of her world. We don’t see her struggling to be the best, or complaining about how hard it is to be recognized in a field dominated by men. In fact, she believes women conductors have no reason to complain about disadvantage or discrimination. While men often use money and power to fuel their sense of entitlement, Lydia stakes her claim on her own intelligence. She takes what she wants from people and leaves scorched earth behind. She’s great and awful in equal measure, so compelling you can’t turn away from her, but also touching in a way that never courts our pity. She’s unlike anyone we’ve ever seen onscreen, which may help explain why this is only Field’s third movie as a director, even though he has worked steadily through the years as an actor: he’s obviously a guy who waits for the right one to come along.

Read more: The 52 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2022

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically. Blanchett, though extremely gifted, can be excessively mannered. (Her 2014 Oscar-winning role in Blue Jasmine is Exhibit A; she hits each Blanche du Bois-inflected note with tuning-fork precision.) But she can also be a performer of great, near-alien strangeness and beauty, and that’s the subterranean current she’s tapping as Lydia Tár. This is a willful, charismatic performance, stubborn and elegant as a vine.

When it comes to telling us who Lydia is and what she’s about, Field and Blanchett throw us into the deep end without even asking if we can swim. As the movie begins, we see Lydia prepping for an onstage discussion in New York. She’s turned out in supple, androgynous custom-made goods that seem to float on her body; she busies herself with breathing exercises as she waits in the wings. She’s all about preparation, which is a kind of control; with a sturdy diaphragm, you can conquer the world.

The New Yorker ’s Adam Gopnik, playing himself, introduces her to the audience by reciting a seemingly endless list of her accomplishments: She’s the first woman to have been appointed principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker. She’s nearly as well respected a composer as she is a conductor. And her soon-to-be-published memoir has the kind of look-at-me title Norman Mailer would have envied: Tár on Tár . Lydia deflects Gopnik’s fawning praise with withering modesty, and as the predictable Q&A-type questions start piling up, her answers race ahead, moving on multiple planes like dueling Double Dutch jump ropes, parabolas wriggling over and under one another like unmappable brain waves. She speaks of her idols, Bernstein and Mahler—she’s preparing a performance of the latter’s Symphony No. 5 in Berlin. She scoffs at the idea that women conductors need to be referred to by the special, feminized form maestra. (“They don’t call astronauts astronettes ,” she says with a wan smile.) She rails against the perception of a conductor as a human metronome, but then doubles back to embrace it: “Time’s the thing,” she says, the essential component of interpretation. This is Blanchett performing as a performer, being excessive on purpose, swaggering in her own house of mirrors.

In addition to a great, prestigious job, Lydia has what would seem to be an exquisitely curated home life. She lives in Berlin with her partner, Sharon (played by the great German actor Nina Hoss, whose name, if there were justice in the world, would be as big as Blanchett’s), and their grade-school-age daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who’s not as well-adjusted as she might be. The suggestion—and the reality—is that Lydia is so busy being Lydia Tár that she’s dropping the ball at home. But out in the world, she’s greatly in demand as an inspirational figure, and she lets no one off the hook. We see her giving a master class at Juilliard, and she thinks nothing of setting one kid straight when they explain that, “as a BIPOC, pan-gender person,” they fail to find much to respond to in a dead cis white male like Bach. Lydia is exasperated by that response, and says as much, in a highly undiplomatic way—but she also sits at the piano, with the student at her side, and eagerly runs through a few brief passages, as if to cut a path through the students’ collective dismissiveness. Bach, she explains as she spins out a phrase with a question mark built right in, “is never certain of anything.” She strives to counteract the reductive thinking that’s been programmed into these young people: “Don’t be so eager to be offended.”

But being on top of the world comes with its temptations, and it soon becomes clear that Lydia’s sexual indiscretions may not be the forgivable kind: she has used her influence not only to seduce others, but to hurt them. Lydia is gay—she describes herself cavalierly as a “U-Haul lesbian,” whatever that might mean—though it’s hard to conceive of her as a sexual being: she’s so brainy, so exacting, so in love with the notion of drawing magic out of thin air in the form of music, that there doesn’t seem to be room for a libido. But those who are close to her—like her ambitious assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who aspires to be a conductor herself, and her partner Sharon, who is also first violinist in her orchestra, and the first to notice when Lydia’s eye starts roving—have seen how successful a manipulator she is. The movie makes no excuses for Lydia’s behavior, and Blanchett’s performance faces it squarely. Lydia is a woman who believes she can control everything around her, as if her ability to wrangle notes as they float through the air has turned her into a god, a being of great power and vengefulness.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Field’s previous two films were adapted from previously existing sources: In the Bedroom, from 2001, was drawn from an Andre Dubus short story, and Little Children, from 2006, was based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name. But Tár, he has said, was written specifically for Blanchett, and his surefooted direction makes the most of her every line and gesture. When Blanchett as Lydia stands before her musicians, she’s so open she may as well be listening through every pore. In her kingdom of woodwinds and strings, she can hear things we can’t, like the rush of wind beneath a bird’s wing—she knows intuitively whether that whoosh is too loud or too soft, and she can shift it accordingly. Blanchett learned to speak German, play piano and conduct an orchestra for the role, though what she does goes beyond mere research and memorization. Her movements are precise, definitive, balletic: Blanchett plays a woman who knows what she was born to do, and the thrill of it sets her eyes ablaze. Tár doesn’t offer anything as comfortable as redemption, and it asks us to fall in love, at least a little, with a tyrant. But how often do we see women portrayed this way, as magnificent rather than admirable? Lydia Tár is the antithesis of tote-bag feminism, not least because she knows that the power of a question is greater than that of a slogan.

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‘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. 

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That “maybe” is because Fields has made Tár a somewhat mysterious endeavor. Someone — maybe someones — is working to undo Tár from the inside. We see the computer screen of someone editing Tár’s Wikipedia page, but we don’t know who. A livestream from within Tár’s hotel room in New York is held by an unidentified hand, typing out gibes about the conductor to some equally unknown person. Someone turns on the metronome in Tár’s study one night. Someone else — this time a person we know — sets her loose on a cat and mouse game in an old building complex in Berlin, to horrifying results that may or may not have been intended. At one point, Tár goes on a jog through a park and hears a woman screaming for her life in the distance. She never finds the woman. It’s enough to drive a person mad.

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‘TÁR’ review: Cate Blanchett enthralls in this remarkable character study

Movie review.

In the first moments of Todd Field’s mesmerizing character study “TÁR,” we see conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) waiting backstage to be introduced for an onstage conversation. She girds herself for the interrogation; taking a few deep breaths — decisive, metallic — and buttoning her jacket as if it might shield her from danger. Watching, you realize that Blanchett already has you hooked; she’s an actor able to find nuance and character in the simple act of breathing. From this scene flows a remarkable two and a half hours, in which we come to know if not necessarily understand this woman as the gilded world around her begins to crumble. With Blanchett in nearly every frame, this long movie never feels slow.

Tár is, we quickly learn, both genius and monster; an American musician living abroad and acclaimed worldwide for her composing (she’s an EGOT) and her conducting of the world’s major orchestras. She lives in Berlin, where she conducts the city’s acclaimed orchestra and has a child in partnership with the orchestra’s concertmaster (Nina Hoss). She is charming, when she wants to be: That onstage conversation that opens the film has her beautifully explaining how a conductor leads an orchestra “on the most extraordinary tour of pleasures.” And she is a nightmare; a user of people, icily dismissive of those who can’t help her (such as the students she instructs in a tense master class), tossing aside those whose usefulness she has outgrown, indifferent to the power dynamics at play. In one scene, she threatens a young child, and the temperature around you suddenly seems to drop.

It’s been a long wait for a new Todd Field film, of which this is only his third. His previous two movies were literary adaptations — his 2001 debut “In the Bedroom,” a wrenching story of a family facing tragedy, was based on an Andre Dubus work, and his 2006 drama of suburban parenthood, “Little Children,” was written with novelist Tom Perrotta. In both, he demonstrated a fascination with actors (Field is an actor himself) and an uncanny patience, letting the camera find the emotion in silence, in the subtlety on an actor’s face, in a breath.  

Here, with Blanchett (Field has said the film was written for her, and wouldn’t have been made if she’d said no), he returns with an enormous crescendo. “TÁR” is full of unusual artistic choices: sudden cuts to strange dream sequences or unexplained events, passages in German that aren’t subtitled (though Blanchett manages to convey the meaning regardless), a general darkness to Florian Hoffmeister’s elegant cinematography that matches the nighttime tones of Blanchett’s voice. But, in keeping with Field’s trademark, every performance feels detailed and real. Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) is particularly haunting as Tár’s young assistant, a fellow musician quietly waiting for recognition that never comes. And watch the faces of the symphony members, particularly a cellist whose seniority Tár casually disregards; each has their own story.

But this tale of ambition and its cost — and its collateral damage — is Blanchett’s movie, and she delivers a tour de force in every scene. In the conducting sequences, she seems to stroke the music into existence; it’s as if she’s breathing it. At the gym, she hits a punching bag with a precise rhythm; at home, she moves like a self-important guest, all too aware of her status. “They can’t all conduct, honey,” she imperiously tells her small daughter, who has arranged her stuffed animals in a semicircle and wants to give them each a pencil to hold. “It’s not a democracy.”

With Cate Blanchett, Noémie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Alan Corduner, Mark Strong. Written and directed by Todd Field. 157 minutes. Rated R for some language and brief nudity. Opens Oct. 21 at multiple theaters.

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'Tár' review: Cate Blanchett dazzles in one of the year's best films

Tár is director Todd Field's third feature-length film — his first in 16 years. That's a long time between realized projects, but if we have to wait another 16 years for a film at Tár 's level, I'm more than happy to settle in for the long haul. That's because Tár is, simply put, a masterwork on all fronts.

Field's direction guides us superbly into the world of lauded conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), in which accomplished musicians, wealthy music lovers, and doting admirers clamor for her attention. Tár presides over it all with an air of crafted ease. In one of the film's first scenes, she discusses her myriad accomplishments with the New Yorker 's Adam Gopnik, touching on her mentor Leonard Bernstein, the works of Gustav Mahler, and the temporality of conducting. Her responses are measured, casual, and seemingly spontaneous. Yet there's a sense of deliberation, of practice. Just before this, we watch as a high-end tailor painstakingly crafts a suit for Tár. It's image curation in real time.

Image is key to Tár , both the movie and the character. As a conductor, Tár has achieved an exceptional level of fame and acclaim. She is the conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic, has earned EGOT status , and is releasing a book titled Tár on Tár . She's also about to embark on the most important recording of her life: a live performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 5.

Throughout, Tár appears to be in total control of her process. She dismisses coworkers she disagrees with, chooses soloists based on her own whims, and selects the concept and pose for her upcoming album cover — even though doing any of this means upsetting those she has worked with for years. The consequences of these actions, as well as some chilling accusations, threaten to derail everything Tár has worked for.

Tár is a character study of the highest caliber.

Field and Blanchett dissect Tár bit by bit as these accusations come to light. Our clues to her wrongdoings start small, yet ominous: a shot of a redheaded young woman surveying Tár while she's in New York, then hints of frightening e-mails. As the picture becomes clearer, Field moves further into the realm of the surreal. Abstract dreams plague Tár, as do strange occurrences at her home in Berlin. In what feels like a musical spin on Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart , Tár hears a metronome ticking away in her office, with no one having set it off.

With moments like these, Field moves this psychological drama into the realm of horror, with a scene involving disembodied screams helping with the genre-melding. Like its protagonist, Tár is many things all at once: a psychological drama, a foray into horror, a (very) dry comedy, and a relationship drama.

Scenes oscillate between the humorous and the horrifying, but as viewers, you never lose your sense of awe at the level of craft on display. Take a scene in which Tár teaches a conducting class at Juilliard. Shot in what appears to be one long take, the sequence examines Tár as she faces off with Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), a pangender and BIPOC student who feels uncomfortable conducting the music of old, white composers like Bach. Tár hounds Max on questions of identity and art. Should she, a self-described "U-Haul lesbian," stop engaging with material by those who would question her identity? No, she argues: "If you want to dance the mask, you must service the composer." Sublimation of the identity is key.

Tár's approach to speaking with Max begins in a somewhat friendly fashion, yet quickly veers toward condescension. Field tracks Blanchett's every move as she prowls around the large, mostly empty classroom, turning a seminar into a pulse-pounding confrontation between two people with a wildly skewed power dynamic. The scene wrings uncomfortable laughs and winces from the viewer and sets up the dichotomy of Tár: She is at once a brilliant artist and a menacing authority figure. How do you reconcile the two? As with the case of composers such as Bach, is it possible to separate the art from the artist? Or must we serve the artist at risk of our own values and identities? Tár thrives on these questions, its steely color palette of cool blues and neutral tones visually evoking the moral gray area in which Tár sees herself acting.

Cate Blanchett owns every second of Tár.

Taking a page from Tár's book to think about sublimating identity and obliterating the self in service of art, we need look no further than Blanchett's own brilliant performance. She wholly embodies both the near-mythic figure of Tár and the uglier truths at the core of the legend. Her work is precise, raw, and impossibly magnetic.

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In Tár's New Yorker talk, she delves into how the conductor dictates the time of a piece. "You cannot start without me. I start the clock," she says. "However, unlike a clock, sometimes my second-hand stops, which means time stops." The same could be said of Blanchett's role: Her every move modulates the rhythm of the film. When she retreats into herself, time slows. When she bursts into fits of rage or fear, the movie itself lets loose all the coiled tension it's been building. To watch Blanchett as Tár is to be mesmerized.

The supporting cast of Tár is also splendid, in particular, Nina Hoss as Tár's wife, Sharon, and Noémie Merlant as Tár's assistant, Francesca. Both excel as women who are clearly devoted to Tár yet are forced to reckon with that relationship as the film nears its breaking point. Tár may be the film's primary focus, but Sharon and Francesca are key players whose actions — and performances — shape Tár in sometimes subtle, sometimes earth-shattering ways.

Blanchett, Field, and Tár 's entire cast and crew have created a titan of a movie. It's thorny, it's haunting, and even though it's two and a half hours long, every single moment is a stunningly crafted necessity. Tár is the work of maestros across the board, delivering not only one of the best performances of the year, but also perhaps the best film of the year as well.

Tár was reviewed out of the 60th New York Film Festival; it opens in theaters Oct. 7.

Topics Film

Belen Edwards is an Entertainment Reporter at Mashable. She covers movies and TV with a focus on fantasy and science fiction, adaptations, animation, and more nerdy goodness.

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Movie review: tár.

Bob Mondello

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

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‘Tár’ review: Cate Blanchett is masterful as maestro in a crisis

The Aussie actor's note-perfect performance will surely win an Oscar

L ydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is a scarily accomplished conductor and composer who lives a life of luxury. She’s the first woman to lead the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, but when she has engagements in New York, her wealthy benefactor Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) sends a private jet.

Tár lives in a large, tastefully greige apartment with her supportive partner Sharon (Nina Hoss), who’s also her lead violinist, and their somewhat introverted daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic). Sharon handles most of the childcare because Tár’s focus is clearly her career: she has already completed the EGOT clean sweep (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), and is about to publish a book called Tár on Tár .

Lydia Tár isn’t a real person, but this riveting film about the corrupting effects of power and privilege will make you think she is. That’s partly because writer-director Todd Field has created a terrifyingly believable character and world that she presides over. This is Field’s first film in 16 years and he hasn’t held back: Tár has an epic 157-minute runtime that it thoroughly justifies.

Tár also feels real because of Blanchett’s virtuoso performance that has just won her a Golden Globe . The scenes where she conducts the orchestra aren’t just convincing, but thrilling and transportative. Her maestro (as everyone calls Tár) is brilliant, self-absorbed, manipulative, duplicitous and cruel. In a chilling early scene, she confronts her daughter’s playground bully by looking the little girl in the eye and hissing: “I will get you.”

Tár is preparing for a live recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 which is expected to become another monumental achievement, but she is also facing myriad distractions. She wants to get rid of doddery assistant conductor Sebastian Brix (Allan Corduner), but knows it will look too convenient if she replaces him with her assistant-cum-protégé Francesca Lentini (Noémie Merlant). After all, rumours are already swirling about Tár’s questionable relationships with young women seeking to climb the classical ladder.

One of them, whom we never see on screen, seems to be suffering from mental health issues and is possibly stalking Tár. As chaos creeps into the maestro’s previously serene universe, everyday sounds appear to disturb her greatly. Still this doesn’t stop Tár from developing an inappropriate fixation with Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), a talented twentysomething cellist who has just joined the orchestra. She even hatches a shameless plan to further the young musician’s progress.

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When Sharon tells her arrogant partner that nearly every relationship in her life is “transactional”, she’s absolutely correct. Tár is a smooth groomer who extracts what she wants from everyone in her orbit, but she is also being used by others. Equally, Field’s film isn’t just about a hubristic abuser getting her comeuppance; it also poses timely questions about identity politics and our ability to separate great art from the problematic artists who made it.

After Tár’s life falls apart, Field seems to fumble in finding a way to leave her. He does come up with one – his closing shot will make you gasp – but only after a slightly protracted final act. Then again, perhaps this is intentional: Tár may have been brought down to earth, but like so many monsters, she’s nothing if not resilient. This dazzling character study will haunt you long after the credits roll.

• Director: Todd Field
• Starring: Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant
• Release date: January 13 (UK)

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Tár Brilliantly Undoes an Ego Monster of an Artist

Tár is about someone who gets Me Too’d. Its central figure is a celebrity conductor whose career is reaching its apex when it collides with allegations of misconduct. The fact that she’s female would play, in the hands of a less interesting filmmaker, like a twist or some kind of thought experiment — What if a woman were the accused? What then ? But Tár was written and directed by Todd Field, who’s so interesting that, despite all the acclaim received by In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006), he couldn’t get another project into production for 15 years, and it’s a lot more intrigued by the dynamics of ego and acclaim than it is with gender. Rather than fixate on the question of whether women can abuse power (the answer is obviously yes, though as with most things, we have historically been given less opportunity), Tár wraps itself up in the life of its imperious protagonist, dwelling on how accustomed she has become to being indulged, and how accustomed everyone around her has become to indulging her.

It’s a total knockout, both austere and dryly hilarious, and its quality is impossible to consider separately from its colossal lead performance. As Lydia Tár, Cate Blanchett makes herself intense, awful, awe-inspiring, and ridiculous — someone who may very well be great, but who’s also been pickled in her own praise. Lydia was born Linda, we learn in a passing exchange that speaks volumes. Tár is packed with details that reward close attention, not because it’s an especially plotty film, but because it keeps its gaze on its main character, mirroring her own self-consumed existence. Events that Lydia’s not paying direct attention to tend to slip by the corners of or off the screen entirely, at least until they become urgent enough that she can no longer ignore them. And the eyes of the world — at least, the elite world of classical music that Lydia inhabits — are usually on her, as emphasized by the subsequent acts of surveillance and performance with which the film begins.

In the opening scene, Lydia, asleep on a plane to New York, is unknowingly livestreamed on a phone belonging to one of the people in her orbit, though which one, and who this unseen figure is messaging with, has been a subject of debates I’ve since had with friends and colleagues. Then she’s onstage with The New Yorker ’s Adam Gopnik for a pitch-perfect marvel of a talk, from the rumble of chummy laughter from the audience at Gopnik’s not-quite-jokes to the reveal that Lydia’s soon-to-be-published memoirs are titled Tár on Tár . She demurs when her own milestones are brought up — Blanchett gleams like platinum in the stage lights — citing the women conductors who’ve come before her as the real pioneers, but also clearly disliking having her success framed in the context of struggles against sexism. Solidarity means that your triumphs are shared, and Lydia wants those triumphs to be hers alone. She’s not a maestra but a maestro, and she’s not driven to reshape the system, just to rise to its top. But not everyone shares that interest, and Field subtly scatters the seeds of his heroine’s eventual downfall.

Lydia’s assistant, Francesca ( Portrait of a Lady on Fire ’s Noémie Merlant), an aspiring conductor, seems to have shrunk her life down to nothing with the expectation that she’ll eventually be handed a plum opportunity. Lydia’s wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), is first violin at the Berlin Philharmonic, and was there before Lydia found her way to being chief conductor, though now Sharon feels like another of her support staffers. A new Russian cellist, the winsome Olga (first-timer Sophie Kauer, a real-life musician), catches Lydia’s eye and starts benefitting from her approval at the expense of the orchestra’s hierarchy. Meanwhile, Krista, a former favorite of Lydia’s from the women’s conductor development program she’s become ambivalent about, haunts the proceedings from offscreen like a forlorn ghost. The only false note this otherwise precise film sounds is at a confrontation during a class at Juilliard, where a student’s choice of a contemporary piece veers into a fight over canon. The poor kid, played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist, has to self-describe “as a BIPOC pansexual,” a phrase plucked off a Twitter bio rather than likely to be spoken, and his faltering defense in the face of Lydia’s bulldozing on behalf of Bach is the one instance of Field tipping his hand.

But Field understands Lydia, and even empathizes with her, which is what makes Tár such a richly rendered creation. Lydia seems to move entirely through spaces of raw concrete, blonde wood, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and to be whisked around in private jets or her sleek car, and the film opts for long, fluid takes that cradle the character just as luxuriously. Hers is a high-end paradise she’ll eventually be cast out of, and while it’s entirely her own fault, Field stresses how her downfall came from her willingness to have art be foremost. That’s a convenient position to hold when it’s your art, and it’s other people’s hearts, dreams, and livelihoods that get thrown into the hopper on your behalf. Lydia, holed up in her old apartment as she works on a new composition, or teasing out the interpretation she wants from a group of musicians, bending their collective sound to her will, is a genuine talent and a true believer in her work. But in Tár , where everyone bends to Lydia like reeds in the wind, you understand how someone can fool themselves into believing that being a monster is just part of the work, that it’s a requirement, that everyone else is just there to enable the work to happen. And in the film’s perfect ending, Lydia finds a way for the work to continue, somewhat. It’s a finale so arid that it takes a beat to appreciate how funny it is, too.

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A funny thing about writer-director Todd Field’s phenomenal film about a world-renowned conductor, “Tár,” is that in the lead-up to its premiere, a popular Google search was “Who is Lydia Tár?”

She’s not real. But audiences have been so conditioned to expect probing musician biopics every fall that many assumed “Tár” was yet another; an upper-crust “ Bohemian Rhapsody ” about a celebrated maestro we would all be more familiar with if we had the time and money to regularly attend the Berliner Philharmoniker and skim Der Spiegel. Nein ! She’s fake.

Running time: 158 minutes. Rated R (some language and brief nudity). In theaters.

Field’s extraordinarily detailed, start-to-finish exhilarating “Tár,” however, might convince you otherwise by the end. 

Honestly, I fully believed she existed after about five minutes, when Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) — the world’s most celebrated conductor — sits down for a ticketed New Yorker talk in Manhattan. The mood, questions and answers are a mirror image of how those pretentious subscriber events really are. It’s spooky.

In an assuredly deep voice, like that of Elizabeth Holmes, Tár discusses the influence of her mentor Leonard Bernstein (who was, of course, real) and her five years spent studying in Africa; she poetically explains the importance of time on conducting a piece of music. The scene borders on satirical, but those pinky-out affairs always do.

And the layers never let up. Field relishes in specifics: boardrooms, blind auditions, Juilliard master classes, Le Bernardin lunches with donors, emails to conductors Riccardo Muti and Gustavo Dudamel. Rather than reality becoming banal, however, the film spins a terrifying and claustrophobic web.

“Tár” is not a slice-of-life story about the classical music world, but a thriller rooted in reality about how steep and crushing the fall can be for culture figures we’ve turned into golden gods. One day you’re on posters at the airport, the next you vanish.

At her height, she’s a celebrity as principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker and lives in Germany with her wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s first-chair violinist, and little daughter. Lydia’s home life, though, is a dish of spinach she pushes off to the side in favor of losing herself to music and doing whatever it takes, with Shakespearean gusto, to retain power. Tár is a supremely gifted monster.

The people around the conductor — her wife, assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) and Berlin predecessor — are both loves and leeches. They protect her and use her at the same time. After reading the manuscript of her memoir “Tár on Tár” (hilarious), a retired musician hands her a beautiful card praising it. She emotionally thanks him, and he clarifies, “It’s a quote for the book jacket.” 

As past failings come to light, and her carefully maintained shield begins to crumble, Tár spirals into paranoia and Field’s tell-tale movie closes in on us, too. Wisely taking morality out of the plot, the director never lets us see first-hand her indiscretions that have been whispered about (you can probably guess what they are) or even confirms them, and he doesn’t judge her one way or another. We spend the entire film in her head.

Blanchett, a shoo-in for Best Actress unless Michelle Williams hires a hitman, excels in hypnotic-eyed parts like Tár (see: “Blue Jasmine” and “Carol”). Too often in the past, though, the actress has been subsumed by her own ethereal aura, leaning on freaky stares and that Galadriel voice to stir us up. This is much deeper work from her with an absorbing peaks-and-valleys journey and honest emotion. The match of larger-than-life actress to larger-than-life role is perfection.

The actress may be just 53, but Tár is already Blanchett’s Lear.

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I’m not coming out and accusing the writers of “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” of using A.I., a touchy subject in Hollywood these days. But if a computer had written this blockbuster sequel, it wouldn’t turn out much different. 

Serving as a more direct sequel to 2020’s “ Bad Boys for Life ” than people might expect, “Ride or Die” checks all the boxes of a movie like this in a way that feels depressingly half-hearted, afraid to do anything new or creative. It admittedly comes to life in spurts primarily through its hyperkinetic photography and editing. Still, it lacks enough spontaneity or ingenuity, completely content to go through the motions by taking as few risks as possible. It turns out that there was a third option: Ride, Die, or Tread Water.

Almost everything in “Ride or Die” aggressively mirrors something in the last film, from the nausea-inducing drive through Miami that opens each installment to a close encounter with the Grim Reaper for one of the beloved characters. The previous film saw Mike Lowery ( Will Smith ) getting shot on South Beach, while this one gets going with Marcus Miles ( Martin Lawrence ) having a heart attack at Mike’s wedding to Christine ( Melanie Liburd ). While the attempted murder in the third film started a narrative about friendship and making the most of another chance at life, this one is used for a bit goofier purpose as Marcus believes he’s now basically immortal. After all, while he was near death, the ghost of Captain Conrad Howard ( Joe Pantoliano ) told him that it wasn’t his time—so now he can run through traffic, even though his wife and work life partner won’t let him eat Skittles anymore.

Whereas “For Life” had immediacy with the attempt on Mike’s life launching the plot, this one meanders for too long before getting down to business. While Marcus was clinging to life, Conrad-Wan Kenobi told him that “a storm is coming,” which turns out to be in the form of a cartel enforcer named McGrath (a truly dull and uninspired Eric Dane ), who is basically just a plot function for action. One of the most poorly defined and generally incompetent villains in a blockbuster in years is introduced, framing Howard for corruption by wiring drug money into the deceased captain’s account. As the system seems to be burning Howard’s legacy, Marcus and Mike know that they have to clear his name at whatever cost, a mission that requires some insider cartel knowledge courtesy of the incarcerated Armando (the charismatic Jacob Scipio ), Mike’s son from the last film.

It's not a “Bad Boys” movie if the heroes aren’t pushing back against the system, which includes in this film a potential future Miami mayor named Lockwood ( Ioan Gruffudd ), who is romantic partners with Mike’s ex and the new Captain, Rita Secada (Paola Nunez). It also turns out that Captain Howard’s daughter Judy ( Rhea Seehorn ) is a US Marshall, and her daughter Callie (Quinn Hemphill) joins the action largely to be another eventual damsel-in-distress. A cast that’s way too big also includes Tasha Smith as Marcus’s wife Theresa (a recasting from Theresa Randle ), the return of Vanessa Hudgens & Alexander Ludwig , and a bunch of random cameos, some of which are inspired, some of which are again echoes of things done better in previous films.

Of course, a Bad Boys movie is about the leads—the chemistry between Smith and Lawrence has always been at the heart of why people love these movies. Much of the charm of the 2020 flick was seeing how they hadn’t lost a step in that department despite 17 years between flicks. Bluntly, it’s just not as tight here, with a lot of jokes in the first half falling flat and so much of the material that’s supposed to read as dramatic feeling shallow and overly familiar, making for a film that's shorter than the last one but feels notably longer because of its clunky flow. Sure, no one comes to a Bad Boys for depth, but writers Chris Bremner and Will Beall can't find the right voice. This crops up most notably in the way they keep peppering in more complex ideas like rampant corruption and even their villain's radicalization through torture, only to do precisely nothing with it. If you’re gonna be goofy and dumb, lean into it—don’t casually bring up how 9/11 changed the world.

To be fair, directors Adil & Bilall know how to deliver in a few action set-pieces wherein their obsession with drone photography gets to be the film's real star. Every shootout features a circling drone camera view of the action, spinning around the room in a manner that gives the movie most of its momentum. Sure, some of it may be designed to hide that Smith and Lawrence can’t exactly pull off John Wick-esque choreography at this point, but there’s a chaotic fluidity to the action that’s the film’s greatest strength. It’s flashy and stylish and keeps the viewer’s eye bouncing around the frame to take it all in. A helicopter sequence and a final shootout at a gator farm are truly enjoyable—even as the plot and the motivations of the cogs within them make less and less sense as the movie goes on (never mind the physics that give Marcus the strength of the Hulk in that copter)—and Scipio deserves some credit for the way he carries action scenes with an intensity that the rest of the film often lacks. He could easily carry his own 'Bad Boys Jr.'

“Bad Boys for Life” had the element of surprise, a much-delayed sequel that blended nostalgia and modern action filmmaking techniques to satisfy viewers just before the pandemic. It’s understandable why the team behind “Ride or Die” chose to run it back again instead of taking risks and building on what worked about that comeback with something new. Financially understandable doesn't make it good. Even A.I. can tell you that.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

115 minutes

Will Smith as Mike Lowrey

Martin Lawrence as Marcus Burnett

Vanessa Hudgens as Kelly

Alexander Ludwig as Dorn

Paola Nuñez as Rita

• Adil El Arbi
• Bilall Fallah
• Chris Bremner

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‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’ Review: Will Smith and Martin Lawrence Make the Franchise’s Fourth Entry Tastier Than It Has Any Right to Be

The two stars are in top form, and so past being too old for this shit that it almost seems young again.

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If there are five ages of man, maybe there are four ages of “Bad Boys.” There’s the early age — the original “Bad Boys” came out in 1995 — of youthful effrontery: zappy, flashy, mouthy, decadent. There’s the age when the heroes start to say, “We’re too old for this shit!” There’s the age when they’re too old to even be saying that.

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The two go through the paces of a conspiracy thriller, centering on corrupt cops and cartels, that plays like an exercise in ultraviolence jacked, at moments, to video-game intensity. But that’s all very standard.

A few scenes later, at Mike’s wedding to Christine (Melanie Liburd), Marcus makes a suitably embarrassing best-man speech and then, on the dance floor, suffers a heart attack. It looks like he’s a goner, signified by a trippy sequence in which he communes with the partners’ late beloved boss, Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano), on a stretch of beach that looks like heaven. But Howard says, “It’s not your time.” Marcus recovers, with a new lease on life that tells him to leave his creeping caution behind. He now thinks he’s invincible, and that his job is to heal everyone else’s mystic torment.

That sounds like a cliché (and is), but Lawrence invests Marcus’s born-again personality with a cockeyed sincerity that makes it urgent and uproarious. He’s the perfect foil for Mike, who Smith embodies with an ageless stoic finesse, a hotheaded cool so debonair it’s almost uncanny. These two actors, with nothing matching but their goatees, have a spiky bromantic chemistry. They don’t just ping off one another’s lines — they lock and load each other.

I went into the movie wondering how the Slap would impinge on Smith’s ability to be his airless and jocular Will Smith self, but he acts with supreme confidence and timing. And the film doesn’t sidestep his awkward moment of infamy. It makes direct reference to it. In the climax, Smith gets repeatedly slapped by his partner, who keeps calling him bad boy , and the scene acts as a kind of pop exorcism. It’s “punishing” Smith, making cruel fun of his transgression, and just maybe, in the process, allowing him to crawl out from under the image of it.

The plot is strictly standard issue. A press conference reveals that the late Capt. Howard is being smeared for corruption. Was he in cahoots with the cartels? We know the answer is no. But somebody was, and it’s up to Mike and Marcus to figure out who, even though the film doesn’t keep it a secret. (It’s a military baddie who assassinates people like he was swatting mosquitoes.) Mike and Marcus end up on the run along with Armando (Jacob Scipio), the underworld cold case who was revealed, in the previous film, to be Mike’s son.

“Ride or Die,” in its flippant way, is a movie about “family,” and that works because the film’s co-directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (returning from “Bad Boys for Life”), are experts at fashioning and executing hair-trigger situations that hinge on the transformation of loyalty into action. There’s a hypnotic shootout aboard a military helicopter, a crowd-pleasing encounter at an NRA encampment, a rollicking finale at a Florida theme park abandoned by everyone but its crocodiles, as well as attitude-drenched cameos from Tiffany Haddish, DJ Khaled, and Michael Bay. Mostly, though, there are Smith and Lawrence, making yesterday’s overcooked street-smart popcorn seem tastier today than it has any right to be.

Reviewed at Regal Union Square, New York, June 3, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 115 MIN.

• Production: A Sony Pictures Releasing release of a Columbia Pictures, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Westbrook Studios, 2.0 Entertainment production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Will Smith, Chad Oman, Doug Belgrad. Executive producers: Chris Bremner, Martin Lawrence, James Lassiter, Jon Mone, Mike Stenson, Barry H. Waldman.
• Crew: Directors: Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah. Screenplay: Chris Bremner, Will Beall. Camera: Robrecht Heyvaert. Editors: Asaf Eisenberg, Dan Lebental. Music: Lorne Balfe.
• With: Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Vanessa Hudgens, Tasha Smith, Alexander Ludwig, Paola Núñez, Eric Dane, Joe Pantoliano, Tiffany Haddish, Ioan Gruffud, Jacob Scipio, Melanie Liburd.

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Nyt ‘connections’ today — hints and answers for monday, june 10.

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Find the links between the words to win today's game of Connections.

Looking for Sunday’s Connections hints and answers? You can find them here:

Hey there, folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. It’s going to be yet another busy day for me between Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote and an Ubisoft games event, but it should be fun nonetheless.

Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers are coming right up.

How To Play Connections

In Connections , you’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like horror movie franchises, a type of verb or rappers.

There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.

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Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is typically the hardest one to deduce. The purple group often involves wordplay, so bear that in mind.

Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers.

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.

Today’s 16 words are:

And the hints for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group — central
• Green group — intricate, involving many components
• Blue group — ways to denote separate items in a collection
• Purple group — linked by the official name for the “X” button on a PlayStation controller

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Need some extra help?

Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.

Today’s groups are...

• Yellow group — core
• Green group — complicated
• Blue group — symbols used in making lists
• Purple group — what "cross" might mean

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections answers are...

• Yellow group — core (CRUX, ESSENCE, HEART, SUBSTANCE)
• Green group — complicated (BAROQUE, COMPLEX, ELABORATE, INVOLVED)
• Blue group — symbols used in making lists (ARROW, BULLET, CHECKBOX, HYPHEN)
• Purple group — what "cross" might mean (ANGRY, BETRAY, CRUCIFIX, HYBRID)

I got a perfect game today, which is a great way to mark a new personal best streak of 20 wins.

I got the groups in order, with ESSENCE giving me an entry way into the yellows. It took me a few minutes to figure out the greens, as I didn’t initially see what would go with COMPLEX, ELABORATE and INVOLVED.

As for the blues, I figured at first the ARROW and BULLET were either projectiles or things that travel forward. I eventually realized the other two words that would go with them. I didn’t figure out the purple connection but hey, I didn’t have to.

That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Tuesday’s game if you need them.

P.S. My excitement for Scotland’s opening game of Euro 2024 on Friday is growing by the minute, so here’s a wee tune from a band from my hometown.

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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west. Chronicles a multi-faceted, 15-year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west.

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The 2024 Festival Films You Need to Know

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The Best Films of 2024, So Far

Our critics pick nine films that they think are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.

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By The New York Times

Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.

In theaters; June 7 on Netflix .

The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically and romantically.

Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now.” Read the review.

‘Civil War’

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