Curator Watchlist
A visually sumptuous, melancholy character study anchored by Angelina Jolie’s committed performance, but it’s more mood piece than full-bodied biopic. If you respond to elegant design, interiority, and a tragic diva portrait, it’s worth your time; if you want a conventional rise-and-fall music biography with strong… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Wed · 2h 3m
Director: Pablo Larraín
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher
Maria Callas, the world's greatest opera singer, lives the last days of her life in 1970s Paris, as she confronts her identity and life.
Pablo Larraín
Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher
A visually sumptuous, melancholy character study anchored by Angelina Jolie’s committed performance, but it’s more mood piece than full-bodied biopic. If you respond to elegant design, interiority, and a tragic diva portrait, it’s worth your time; if you want a conventional rise-and-fall music biography with strong narrative propulsion, it may feel thin.
Maria is less a cradle-to-grave biography than a late-life reverie: a portrait of fame, fragility, and self-mythology. Pablo Larraín frames Callas as a woman living inside her own legend, and the film’s greatest strengths are its immaculate surfaces, hushed sadness, and the sense that every room, costume, and gesture is carrying emotional history.
Angelina Jolie gives the film its center of gravity. Even when the script stays elusive, her physical precision and haunted composure make Callas feel both monumental and deeply isolated. The movie is at its best when it treats performance itself as identity, and when it lets the singer’s grandeur collide with exhaustion, vanity, and regret.
Still, the film can feel emotionally underfed for viewers expecting a richer dramatic arc. It often prefers atmosphere over revelation, and that restraint may read as either elegant or frustrating depending on your tolerance for art-house biography. As a piece of cinematic mourning, though, it’s striking and memorable.
Hungkat (2.5★) · 4739 likes
Can’t wait to see another one of these in 30 or 40 years but this time about Lana Del Rey
Mattia (4★) · 2985 likes
For a moment I really hoped for a Natalie Portman’s cameo
sawah 🦖 (4★) · 2572 likes
NEED those cunty glasses YESTERDAY
noen (4★) · 2058 likes
I wish all the films had Angelina Jolie, she's just... perfect
júlia (3.5★) · 1813 likes
the interior design of maria's apartment oh my god i'm obsessed with the furniture and the paintings
Another intimate, stylized portrait of a famous woman under the pressure of public myth and private grief.
Shares the same claustrophobic, impressionistic approach to a woman trapped inside a role and a legend.
For its elegiac mood, interior female anguish, and refined, literary sense of emotional fragmentation.
A beautifully controlled study of obsession, performance, and the cost of maintaining a public image.
Not similar in subject, but it matches the severe, haunted emotional register and classical craft.
For viewers interested in glamorous surfaces masking psychological tension and old-world sophistication.
A more emotionally direct companion piece about talent, stardom, self-destruction, and performance.
Another sharp portrait of a public woman navigating image, grief, and historical scrutiny.
A serious, stylized biographical drama that treats public legacy as a burdened performance.
For its painterly visuals, mythic approach to an iconic artist, and blend of beauty with pain.
A more jagged but similarly self-aware look at fame, reinvention, and the stories people tell about themselves.
If the appeal is aristocratic decadence, emotional gamesmanship, and immaculate period design.
fame and isolation, late-life reflection, identity and self-mythology, female artistry, performance as persona, grief and regret, celebrity and public scrutiny, memory and decline
prestige drama, biographical portrait, operatic, melancholy, art-house, female-led, 1970s Paris, elegant visuals, psychological, music industry