Maria Callas

Maria is a solid musical bio pic. A great lead performance from Angelina Jolie holds this movie together pretty well and I admire how much she put into this role, especially the opera singing. The plot is a little messy and the pacing is a tad off but I still think the movie is purely entertaining enough to enjoy and it is also educational about this time period and opera in general. It's a beautifully shot and directed movie. I love the editing and the black and white shots are gorgeous. I think this is a solid film from Pablo Larrain with a potential Oscar winning performance from Angelina Jolie.

This movie came as a pleasant surprise to me.

It is not only the great,studied performance by Jolie,an actress that hadn't really convinced me of her ability to act up to now. Nevertheless,in this movie,all the self-admiring,borderline narcissistic traits are absent.

Jolie,immerses herself in Maria's fragile, overall declining character and produces a more than convincing portrait worth accolades.

The representation of the era is quite meticulous too.

The really pleasant surprises are the directorial approach and the screenplay.

Focusing on her last week before dying it has a balanced approach to her memories through few flashbacks,her past and current relations,her adoration of music and opera,her failing health,her feeble attempts for a comeback,her warped perception of reality through the use of a slew of barbiturates,her nostalgia,her need for adulation and love. All in proper doses.

A fine two hours spent getting in touch with Maria..not the Callas!!!

Just watched the film at a film festival. Our entire group was disappointed by what we watched.

The story line was paper thin to us, focused on the last part of her life, with major parts of the history around how events tied together left out. We would move from one scene to another without a clear link between sequences.

The focus seemed to center around Jolie posing for us, rather removed of the charm of the real Maria. I get it - Angelina is gorgeous but where was the spark?

I never felt like I connected with the characters and didn't feel bought into the film. There was a hollowness to this version of Maria Callas.

At the end of the film, as the end credits start, there are scenes of the real Maria Callas - full of personality and charisma - which were unfortunately not portrayed in Jolie's performance.

Gorgeous costume designs but that was it for me.

I have to say director Pablo Larrain's 2024 entry into his iconic 20th-century women trilogy was a disappointment. It starts with the casting as Angelina Jolie may be too iconic herself to portray supreme diva Maria Callas, the least remembered of the trio, the other two being "Jackie" (2016) and Diana in "Spencer" (2021). Jolie conveys the necessary self-possession to carry off the regal image of the world's greatest opera singer, but physically she looks too skeletal to emulate convincingly the more robust figure Callas struck. Written by Steven Knight, the lugubrious, longish film covers the last week of Callas's life in 1977 Paris, a fictionalized account with inevitable flashbacks that cumulatively plays out like a ghost story. All the production elements like the burnished cinematography and set details are impressively handled, but Larrain's creative choices are more arguable, for example, the hallucinogenic images of choruses of people singing back to her in public spaces. There is the ambiguous role of an interviewer (opaquely played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) with the same name as her prescription medication who forces her to confront her legacy. Some of the flashbacks signal more intriguing elements to her story like her rather inchoate relationship with Aristotle Onassis, her traumatizing encounters with Nazis when she was a child, and an intriguing conversation with JFK (played by Caspar Phillipson cast in the same, somewhat inconsequential role in "Jackie"). Her cloistered existence is leavened only by two devoted servants played poignantly by Pierfrancesco Favina and Alba Rohrwacher. Still Jolie's star power has a showcase befitting of her singular talent to convey hubris and vulnerability at almost the same time.

I am sure this film was made with great care and love, BUT what it lacked the most of, in my opinion is BREATH.

Opera singers learn how to controle their breath so to captivate ours. And I agree with the other less favourable reviews that the opening scene really was a bad example of lip-synching particularly because I could not see ms Jolie breathe!

Of course La Callas lived a glamorous life but to me the focus seemed to be more directed towards the visual in this movie.

This is a film that made me stop watching it to the end, and I am sorry for it. I too had high hopes for these two iconic ladies.