Tarr has been interpreted as having a pessimistic view of humanity; the characters in his works are often cynical, and have tumultuous relationships with one another in ways critics have found to be darkly comic.

Tarr frequently collaborated with novelist László Krasznahorkai, film composer Mihály Víg, cinematographer Fred Kelemen, actress Erika Bók, and Ágnes Hranitzky (then his partner).

He has since created an installation that features newly shot film sequences, presented in a 2017 Amsterdam exhibition called Till the End of the World.

At the age of ten, Tarr was taken to a casting session run by Hungarian National Television by his mother, and he ultimately won the role of the protagonist's son in a TV drama adaptation of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

The film was faithful to the "Budapest school" or "documentarist" style popular at the time within Béla Balázs Studios, maintaining absolute social realism on screen.

[citation needed] After completing Családi tűzfészek, Tarr began his studies in the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest.

The 1980 film Szabadgyalog (The Outsider) and the following year's Panelkapcsolat (The Prefab People) continued in much the same vein, with small changes in style.

[3] After 1984's Őszi almanach (Almanac of Fall), Tarr (who had written his first four features alone) began collaborating with Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai for 1988's Kárhozat (Damnation).

A planned adaptation of Krasznahorkai's epic novel Sátántangó took over seven years to realize; the 415-minute film was finally released to international acclaim in 1994.

A shot may, as in the opening of Sátántangó, travel with a herd of cows around a village, or follow the nocturnal peregrinations of a drunkard who is forced to leave his house because he's run out of alcohol.

American writer and critic Susan Sontag championed Tarr as one of the saviors of modern cinema, saying she would gladly watch Sátántangó once a year.

It was scheduled to be released at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival in May, but production was postponed because of the February suicide of producer Humbert Balsan.

[7] In 2020, a 4K restoration of Sátántangó was released on Blu-ray by Curzon Artificial Eye and was made available for online streaming by the Criterion Channel.

In a press release dated 24 January 2011 Tarr made the following statement regarding the imprisonment of filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof: In September 2012, he received the BIAFF special award for lifetime achievement.

"[19] In a letter hung near the entrance to a pro-migration exhibition in front of the Hungarian Parliament, Tarr wrote, "We have brought the planet to the brink of catastrophe with our greediness and our unlimited ignorance.