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Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has selected eight emerging actors from the Baltic Sea region for its Black Nights Stars showcase, including rising stars from Poland, Estonia and Germany.

The group includes US-born German actor Zethphan Smith-Gneist, who appeared in a pivotal single-shot scene in Todd Fields’ TÁR opposite Cate Blanchett, and played his first leading role in an episode of German TV series Zeit Verbrechen, which debuted at this year’s Berlinale.

Selected from Poland is Maria Kowalska, whose breakthrough role came in Michal Gazda’s adaptation of cult Polish novel Forgotten Love for Netflix, and who stars in...

Tár, the third film from writer and director Todd Field, is a fictional biopic structured like a Greek tragedy: here we have a character of prestigious rank and fortune, brought down by something within themselves. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic with an almost impossibly illustrious career behind her, has knowingly committed harmful acts—she is a sexual predator and has abused her position of influence—and her downfall, painful to watch, is precipitated by a growing recklessness, a refusal to heed the warnings the audience can clearly interpret as signs of a coming storm. When the extent of her misconduct is revealed, Tár’s punishment is swift: she can’t see her wife or child, she loses her job, she loses her luxurious home(s), and she loses her status. The film has, for obvious if frustrating reasons, been primarily received as...

This article contains Tár spoilers.

For the last 10 minutes of Todd Field’s Tár, an elusive yet beguiling character study about an elite musician’s fall from grace, the fate of Lydia Tár remains a mystery. We know that Lydia, as played with an erudite augustness by Cate Blanchett, has been exposed to be many things: a sexual predator, a manipulative employer, and a relentlessly selfish spouse. Even her name is an embellishment, with the disgraced Egot winner returning to her forgotten childhood home where her estranged brother calls her Linda. In this context, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the accent mark on her surname is similar affectation—a pretension that reveals a flattering self-regard and overbearing pretension.

But after her brother surmises she hasn’t the faintest idea about what her life really is—accusing her of not knowing “where the hell you came from or where...

Cate Blanchett swallows Tár whole and spits out bullets in return. The role, of a fictional classical conductor somersaulting into her own downfall, was written by director Todd Field solely with her in mind. It’s a performance that functions as a total culmination, the crystallised form of all the women Blanchett’s played in the past – from Elizabeth I to Lilith in Nightmare Alley – who act like they have total control but may actually be hollow on the inside. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a single shot of those ice-blue eyes. A little tension in the muscles and they take on a self-satisfied feeling of mastery over their subject.

It’s not required that we sympathise with Blanchett’s Lydia Tàr. Her talent is plain – she’s a protégée of Leonard Bernstein and is one of the few winners of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award – but she’s also cruel,...

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Few scenes from writer-director Todd Field’s provocative masterpiece Tár have gotten audiences talking — and sometimes hotly debating — more than the first-act showdown between Cate Blanchett’s brilliant conductor, Lydia Tár, and Max, a student in her Juilliard master class. Shot in one white-knuckle take, the ten-minute sequence begins elegantly enough, with Lydia commanding the space in her typical way, a handful of impressionable music students attuned to her every utterance.

But then she hones in on Max — an affable young student played by Zethphan Smith-Gneist — who, it turns out, cares not for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. “As a Bipoc pangender,” Max offers, “I have difficulty connecting with Bach — and wasn’t he a misogynist anyway?” Thus begins a highly charged intergenerational face-off. “If you want to dance the mask,” Tár growls, “you must service the composer. You’ve got to sublimate yourself.

Plot: In the days leading up to the debut of her magnum opus, musician Lydia Tár’s carefully compartmentalized life begins to shatter amid rumors of inappropriate, predatory conduct.

Review: Tár marks director Todd Field‘s first movie in sixteen years, and for lack of a better term, it’s a banger. Like In the Bedroom and Little Children, it’s a deeply layered work, but it’s a shattering portrait of the privilege of prestige and talent. Cate Blanchett delivers perhaps a career-best performance in the lead.

Many will call this the “cancel culture” movie, and to some extent, it is. It’s a nuanced portrait of an artist watching their world crumble around them in real time. Tár is being hoisted on her own petard here, but many critics have taken to calling this film “anti” cancel-culture because Field evokes some empathy for his central figure. That said,...

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The international world of classical music viewed through a famed conductor’s preparations to record Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 might seem like rarefied subject matter, strictly for highbrow aficionados. But Tár is a mesmerizing character study, its fine-grained details extending with needling precision into the shadowy recesses between its oblique scenes. The key talking point will be Cate Blanchett’s astonishing performance — flinty, commandingly self-possessed and ever so slowly splintering under pressure. But no less notable is the return of writer-director Todd Field with a forensically crafted major work, 16 years after his last feature.

Opening Oct. 7 following the fall festival trifecta of Venice, Telluride and New York, the Focus Features release is an intimate portrait of an artist possessed by her work, an exploration of the transportive vitality of great music and a clear-eyed consideration of cancel culture. While there’s likely to...