tar

If it feels like you’ve been hearing about the Borderlands movie for an awfully long time, well—our first glimpse of Cate Blanchett as red-headed bounty hunter Lilith came in June 2021. Now we have a much better look at her character beyond that enigmatic silhouette, and she looks great. The movie itself, well... TBD.Here’s the image, first shared by People and later released by Lionsgate; the studio also revealed a trailer is coming tomorrow, February 21:Image: LionsgateFans of the smash hit space Western video game…

Matthias Glasner’s epic is a black comedy of Franzenesque family dysfunction; maybe not profound exactly but terrifically watchable and entertaining. It is about the time-honoured subject of what we inherit from our parents and what is gained and lost by rejecting that inheritance. The film features that always formidable German actor Lars Eidinger as an orchestra conductor - and it will be no surprise that when he takes to the podium at the Berlin Philharmonic, it is the scene of the biggest and most embarrassing fiasco…

A multi-institutional team of researchers characterized how solar radiation from the sun interacts with individual tar balls dispersed over a mountainous region in northern Italy. Credit: Environmental Science & Technology (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c03498 Days after a wildfire, a type of smoke can linger in the atmosphere that contains tiny, brown, light-absorbing particles known as tar balls. These particles are…

A mold cast of one of the chewed pitch pieces found in the Huseby Klev site. Credit: Verner Alexandersen. Members of a hunter-gatherer group that lived in south-western Scandinavia during the Mesolithic era—approximately 10,000 years ago—may have been affected by tooth decay and gum disease, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. Emrah Kırdök, Anders Götherström…

Does it feel strange still to be talking about Tár?Cate Blanchett: Some things don’t ever leave you. This has been fascinating from the moment of inception, through making and releasing it and now watching people’s reaction to the film deepen and evolve. It’s very rewarding.Todd Field: Yesterday, a woman came up and talked to me about the movie for maybe 25 minutes. She had seen it nine times.CB: We all have our rapid-fire set of judgments when things first come out. I think people were quick to define what the film was,…

Before her personal and professional downfall, Lydia Tár occupied a hallowed slice of the cultural consciousness – a virtuoso pianist and vaunted maestro, protege of the great Leonard Bernstein, the first female conductor of the Berlin philharmonic, an EGOT winner and author of an acclaimed memoir. The type of singular and status-signaling cultural figure who commands the room at a New Yorker talk and basks in the glow of trailblazing achievements while shrugging off the weight of feminism (or the term “maestra”). Her…

Film: Tar Cast: Cate Blanchett, Noemie Merlant, Nina Hoss, Sophie Kauer, Julian Glover, Allan Corduner, Mark Strong Director: Todd Field Rating: 4/5 Runtime: 158 mins Todd Field’s latest is a long-drawn… yes, but a brilliant character study of a magnificent musical polymath, a fictitious world-famous conductor of a major German orchestra, Lydia Tár (Blanchett), a woman very self-aware of her own rarefied talent and without any humility whatsoever. She chairs a scholarship fund run by an investment…

Tár opens with the shot of the titular orchestra conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) standing backstage, as if preparing to perfect her pose and wavelength before she faces the audience. The introduction to Lydia Tár occurs in the succeeding scene- which continues for the next 15 minutes as she sits to be interviewed onstage by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker (playing himself). Lydia, we learn, is an EGOT winner, and has been the conductor of the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, before she arrived at the…

The great crack-up of Lydia Tár, the Berlin Philharmonic’s entirely fictitious but docudramatically real-seeming chief conductor, has given the cinema its greatest spectacle, its greatest provocation and its greatest pleasure. If there is any justice, it will be producer-director Todd Field, with fellow producers Alexandra Milchan and Scott Lambert, who will be invited up on stage at the end of the evening to receive the climactic best picture statuette.Cate Blanchett is wonderfully commanding as the haughty sociopath…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeCate Blanchett says her performance in Todd Field’s Tar was “very dangerous and career-ending”.During her acceptance speech for winning Best Actress at the Baftas on Sunday night (19 February), the 53-year-old actor thanked the Tar producers for “holding their nerve” in making the film.Blanchett plays the role of conductor Lydia Tar, who is a complicated genius facing misconduct…