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.

When a student expresses their reluctance to study J. S. Bach`s works due to his race and gender, she encourages the class to focus on the music, rather than the composer's identity.

Lydia changes her scorecard to ensure Olga a spot in the orchestra and grants her a soloist position in the companion piece, Elgar's Cello Concerto.

Lydia is haunted by an increasing sensitivity to sound, vivid surreal nightmares, daytime hallucinations, chronic pain, and enigmatic patterned scribbles resembling those Krista once made.

A manipulatively edited cellphone video of Lydia's Juilliard class goes viral and an article accusing her of sexual predation appears in the New York Post.

Lydia, accompanied by Olga, returns to New York City to attend the deposition in the lawsuit of Krista's parents and to promote her book; they are met by protestors.

Advised to lie low by her management agency, she returns to her modest childhood home on Staten Island, where certificates of achievement bearing her birth name, Linda Tarr, hang on the wall.

)[19] All diegetic music was recorded live on-set, including Blanchett's piano playing, Kauer's cello, and the Dresden Philharmonic's performances.

Cellist Sophie Kauer plays Elgar's Cello Concerto on the album, backed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Natalie Murray Beale.

[29] John Mauceri served as consultant on Field's script, helping inform the tenor and accuracy of Lydia Tár's comments on classical music and musicians.

[31][32][33] 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.

[35] Some commentators attributed the poor US domestic box office performance to the film's subject matter alienating a general audience.

[37][38] 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".

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.

[44][45]Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times regarded the film as:"Both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building", stating that the director's "storytelling draws no artificial distinction between the big and the small, the important and the mundane; everything we see and hear matters.

[49]Anthony Lane of The New Yorker stated: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.

Now this is insidious, as one can get lulled into this and ultimately get used to it, leading those of us who've experienced cinema in the past – as much more than that – to become despairing of the future of the art form, especially for younger generations.

All the aspects of cinema and the film that you've used, attest to this ... conveyed through a masterful mise-en-scène, as controlled, precise, dangerous, precipitous angles and edges geometrically kind of chiseled into wonderful frame compositions.

[52]Paul Thomas Anderson presenting Field with the Director Medallion at the 75th annual DGA Awards said, Every detail matters in this film.

"[58] Writing for Time, Stephanie Zacharek went further: "Tár doesn't offer anything as comfortable as redemption, and it asks us to fall in love, at least a little, with a tyrant.

"[59] Music professor Ian Pace discussed the issue in The Conversation: "It would be rash to assume that such a figure could never act in a predatory and exploitative manner.

Had it been a celebration of female power, it would have been no less superficial ... Field has taken the 'Maestro myth' that portrays the conductor as a kind of hypermale and shown that the same issues may apply to a woman.

"[65] In her critique for The New York Review of Books titled "The Instrumentalist", prize-winning novelist and professor Zadie Smith commended Cate Blanchett's performance,[66] and the classroom scene at the Juilliard School was described by A. O. Scott as "a mini-course in the dos and don'ts of contemporary pedagogy.

"[69] Film critic Howie Movshovitz,[70] critic and essayist Philippa Snow (ArtReview),[71] Murielle Joudet (Le Monde)[72] and Guillaume Orignac (Cahiers du Cinéma) draw attention to the film's creative open-endedness, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions about its significance and meaning.

"[74] Similarly, Ara Osterweil in Art Forum wrote, "Todd Field's brilliant character study (...) suggest(s) that the ritual excommunications of cancel culture may be as exaggerated as the generic fantasies enacted by Tár’s gamer audience.

"[75] Austrian musicologist and anthropologist Bernd Brabec alleged that part of Lydia Tár's biography read aloud by Adam Gopnik mines his CV.

"[79] Because the film was released in the United Kingdom in January 2023, Tár was included in Sight and Sound's Best Films of 2023,[80] and sat atop the polls of New Statesman[81] and Time Out, with Phil de Semlyen of Time Out writing "Blanchett's Oscar-nominated performance has rightly earned the lion's share of plaudits, but the superb acting is buoyed by Field's subtly off-kilter visual style, lending the 'ripped from the headlines' narrative a hint of Kubrickian uncanniness.

"[84] The March 2023 issue of New York magazine listed Tár alongside Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Elephant Man, Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, Roma, and In the Bedroom, also directed by Field, as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".

"[86] Among other accolades, Tár received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, Best Actress for Blanchett, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing.