‘Maria’ review: Angelina Jolie finds the right pitch in an off-key biopic

Pablo Larrain’s trilogy of famous and fraught 20th-century women – there is apparently no other kind – concludes with Maria. Larrain’s 2024 biopic of opera singer Maria Callas, like its predecessors Jackie (about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and Spencer (about Diana, Princess of Wales), covers a crucial period in its subject’s life.

The movie is set in the week preceding Maria’s death in 1977. She lives in a splendid apartment in Paris. Her famous voice has all but deserted her. She has a worrying addiction to the sedative Mandrax.

Yet, Maria (Angelina Jolie) is every inch the diva, regally swatting away the concerns of her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). What did you take this morning, the fiercely loyal Ferruccio wants to know. Liberties, Maria says.

Steven Knight’s screenplay is suitably theatrical, in keeping with its performative heroine. She has an unending supply of caustic comebacks. I am perfectly happy with the theatre behind my eyes, Maria tells Bruna.

Maria’s slippery touch with reality is evident in her conversations with a television journalist also named Mandrax (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Maria struggles to regain her singing abilities during rehearsals with the conductor Jeffrey Tate (Stephen Ashfield).

Maria is being streamed on Lionsgate Play. Like Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021), Maria projects onto its lead...

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