Movie · 2024 · History, Drama, Music · 2h 3m · R · English
Curator score: 3.8/10 (153.1K ratings)
Overview
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.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.8/10
IMDb: 6.4/10
Letterboxd: 3.34/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 75%
Metacritic: 63
TMDB: 6.5/10
Director
Pablo Larraín
Production
Fremantle, The Apartment Pictures, Komplizen Film, Fabula
Cast
Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Stephen Ashfield, Valeria Golino, Caspar Phillipson, Lydia Koniordou, Vincent Macaigne, Aggelina Papadopoulou, Erofili Panagiotarea, Jörg Westphal, Philipp Droste, Alessandro Bressanello, Paul Spera, Kay Madsen, Lyes Salem, Christophe Favre, Hugo Dillon
Where to watch
Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
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.
Best for
Viewers who like stylized, psychologically inward biopics
Fans of performance-driven films about complicated women
People drawn to gorgeous production design and painterly cinematography
Audiences open to impressionistic, nontraditional storytelling
Skip if
You want a comprehensive account of Maria Callas’s life and career
You prefer energetic, plot-heavy music biopics
Sparse emotional distance and fragmented structure frustrate you
You’re not interested in operatic melodrama or prestige-art-house tone
Overview
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.
Worth noting
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.
Bottom line
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.
Top Letterboxd reviews
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