Review Roundup: Angelina Jolie Stars as Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's MARIA

Angelina Jolie is taking on the role of legendary opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín's new biopic, Maria. Though the movie made its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival back in August, the film is receiving a limited theatrical release on November 27, ahead of its streaming debut on December 11 on Netflix. Find out what critics think of the new film before it hits theaters this week!

Maria is a creative imagining and psychological portrait of Maria Callas, set in Paris, September 1977, during the final week of Callas' life. Maria follows the soprano as she negotiates her public image and private self and reckons with the increasingly blurred boundaries between the venerated “La Divina” and the vulnerable human being.

The movie is directed by Pablo Larraín from a screenplay by Steven Knight. Maria marks Larraín's third biopic following Jackie and Spencer, centering on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana, respectively. 

Maria features a supporting cast that includes Kodi Smit-McPhee, Alba Rohrwacher, Pierfrancesco Favino, and Valeria Golino.

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Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline: "Larraín keeps the camera at a distance; the body is hidden behind a chair. Nothing to see here, you might say, even though there has been — as always in a Pablo Larraín film — so much to see. Something is missing. Perhaps it is that there is nothing of the grit and grind of politics, which often works as the sand in his narrative oyster, not only in the Chilean films like Neruda or No, but Jackie and Spencer too. Maria tells a fascinating story, but it lacks that rasping edge."

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: "...Maria is a far more daring and unconventional take on the final chapter of the legendary soprano’s life than Franco Zeffirelli’s boilerplate 2002 biopic, Callas Forever, starring Fanny Ardant. And Larraín’s film becomes retroactively more affecting when the lovely archival images of Callas over the end credits, full of vitality at the peak of her career, widen the perspective on her sad, accelerated decline."

Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly: "While grief and mental illness were primary components of Jackie and Spencer, here, Larraín probes the music that can come from such misery. Maria is a restless soul, an unreliable narrator, and an imposing presence. She bristles at the notion of being a man's possession in a cabinet, despite the fact that many of her fans treat her with the same entitlement as her lovers. This is a portrait of all that an artist must sacrifice for their work and the ways that is amplified further as a female artist. It's a fable of fame and control, but it's also an ode to a woman who could only find peace by singing her heart out."

Stephanie Zacharek, Time: "Larraín does his movie no favors by using footage of the real Maria Callas in the closing credits sequence: To see her laughing just as she sang, with her whole being, or even just to catch her lost in troubled thought, is to get a jolt of all the vitality Jolie and Larraín have failed to capture. Callas, only 53 when she died, was bigger than life. Maria may burnish her legend. But it also snuffs out her spark."

Radhika Seth, Vogue: "Still, there’s so much ravishing beauty in Maria that it’s hard not to swoon over it. Paris glows with an otherworldly light, as does Maria’s home, a Marie Antoinette-adjacent, Wes Andersonian dream piled high with dusty tomes and Roman busts—they stare at her and she stares back. This is a film about the artifice of performance, about being watched, constantly observing ourselves, and how some people continue to play to the crowd even when no one is left in the proverbial audience."

Martin Tsai, Collider: "Jolie is best when performing Callas the performer. She apparently spent seven months training to sing opera, but this is not so much a comment on her vocals. The two Callas performances that bookend the film showcase the finest and most nuanced acting from her in the film. In other scenes, she is consistently one note. She is supposed to play a diva, but that larger-than-life aura doesn't come across."

Owen Gleiberman, Variety: "We get a lot of glimpses (shot on different film stocks) of Callas on stage, back in her 1950s and ’60s heyday. But none of them are extended enough to let us sink into the sensation of her artistry bringing down the house. At one point, Maria observes that singing opera the way she does is so draining it takes the life out of you. In its way, that’s an awesome thought, but by the end of “Maria” you almost feel like it’s taken the life out of the movie."

David Ehrlich, IndieWire: "If not for Jolie, it’s possible that “Maria” would feel like another form of the unfounded scrutiny that made Callas’ life so miserable; more sensitive, perhaps, but still cobbled together from echoes that are made to sound like a single voice. Jolie gives this immaculately adorned movie a much-needed sense of interiority. Callas may be straining to find if she “still has a voice,” but Jolie’s sharp transatlantic drawl fills the space around her, even in its frailty."

Jeremy Mathai, SlashFilm: "Maria" closes out this trilogy exactly as it started and, for one last time, we're given a window into one of the most unknowable individuals of decades past. Film gods willing, Larraín's next phase will feel just as vital and thrilling as this one."

Steve Pond, TheWrap: "In a movie that is stately on the surface and stormy underneath, Jolie’s drawn, almost architectural features and air of enforced restraint is ideal for Larraín’s vision of Callas. She’s a glorious, luminous wreck, looking for peace but drawn inexorably to a world of grand artifice. “My life is opera,” she says. “There is no reason in opera.”

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