Maria premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be in cinemas soon. Add it to your watchlist. Angelina Jolie’s recent movie career has been a strange one, to say the least.
Either voicing her character in the Kung-Fu Panda series, playing the Disney villain in Maleficent or Marvel’s Thena in the 2021 misfire Eternals . For whatever reason, she’s not sought out the dramatic roles that defined her early years, films like Girl, Interrupted that won her an Oscar in 2000. Now she returns to her roots with a sophisticated, nuanced turn in Maria , the new biopic from Pablo Larraín — the Chilean director who brought us off-kilter films about Jackie Kennedy (2016’s Jackie ) and Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer ), not to mention several films in his native Spanish tackling the Pinochet regime.
Maria brings us a look at the world’s greatest opera singer, Maria Callas. A woman who moved in rarefied circles — she was once married to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — she also moved audiences to tears with her recitals. Scripted by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, who also penned Spencer , the film looks at Callas in the last week of her life.
It begins on 16th September, 1977, the day she died of a heart attack, as doctors and her housemaid, Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher) and butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino) gather solemnly around the body. Rewinding just seven days, Knight’s script gives us a part-imagined expression of this curtain call. In this tim.