Pablo Lorrain has made a trilogy of films focusing on three very influential and important people in the world at the time of their existence. The first two were Jackie, starring Natalie Portman as Jaclyn Kennedy Onasis and the second was Spencer, starring Kisten Stewart as Diana Spencer. The third is about acclaimed opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie). I think it’s the best of the trilogy and Jolie gives the performance of career in the role.

Using a framing device Lorraine starts the film at the end of Callas’s life and then uses a flashback to a week earlier to go through the events leading to her sad yet very untimely demise. During the previous week, she had many different encounters with journalists, voice coaches, and unruly fans who were mad at her.  She also has her two loyal servants help you in various ways including getting her to see a doctor, but all of this was for naught.

Angelina Jolie is an actress who’s been acting for around 25 or so years now and she’s won an Oscar for her role as Lisa, a troublesome recovering drug addict in Girl, Interrupted. She’s done a lot of action films like Wanted, Mr. and Mrs. Smith with her then-husband Brad Pitt, 2 Lara Croft:Tomb Raider Films, and played the Evil yet misunderstood villainous Maleficent in two Disney Live-Action movies reimagining this classic Disney character from Sleeping Beauty. Her role in Maria as the titular Maria Callas is the performance of her lifetime. She is phenomenal in this role as the sick opera singer. She shows the pain, but also the power and command this woman has even at this difficult time in her career/life. Jolie is a surefire frontrunner for her 2nd Academy Award and 1st for Best Actress.

Lorrain does something different with Maria than he’s done with the previous two films in his “Tormented Woman Trilogy”  He uses a few different styles of filmmaking to tell this woman’s story. With the help of Oscar-nominated, El Conde, cinematographer Ed Lackman uses Black & White, Home videos and a muted orange hue of Paris, France during the last week of her life to tell her story. All of these styles worked perfectly in sync to dictate the different times in this woman’s life. This is some of the best camera work and cinematography I’ve seen all year. I was blown away by how gorgeous this biopic looked from the very beginning to the end.

Jolie is the main focus of the film, but it has a few performances in supporting roles that I was very pleased by. Those were Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino as Bruna and Ferruccio Mezzadri Callas’s two faithful servants. These two are both fantastic in these roles. They have so much remorse and concern as these two close consorts of Jolie’s character.  Also, Codi Smit-McPhee plays a friendly journalist, and Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onassis, the extremely rich shipping magnate who is in love with Callas.  Of course, she’s not in love with him at all, but she likes the attention he gives her through the years. Later he would marry widow Jackie Kennedy. This cast is fantastic, but it’s Jolie who shines throughout in every style her character is filmed in.

Lorrain has tied his “Tormented Woman Trilogy” together by various things as mentioned earlier by the connection between the characters in this movie and Jackie, but also Spencer ties into this movie because of the time-period that the films take place in and the circles these characters associate with. They are all celebrities whether they are world leaders, royals, or renowned singers. They all cross paths with each other when they’re at this level of celebrity.  Lorraine does a nice job of tying these people’s worlds together seamlessly.  That’s a part of why these films work so well. He had a plan in mind for the trilogy from the beginning and it worked out.

As far as biopics go this is one of the best I’ve seen in recent years. I tend to gravitate towards sports or music biopics and this one falls into those categories. Throw in some good political biopics in the last decade or so and I’ve enjoyed quite a few biopics of almost any sub-genre lately. This one does the rare thing of being part of a trilogy while also standing on its own as a career achievement for Jolie as the tormented opera singer. While also having a look and style that is beautifully imagined by Lockman.  This is going to go down as one of the best musical biopics of this century bar none. At this rate, I’d love to see Lorrain tackle a sequel to The Fighter or some other sports/ music biopics. He is so good at directing these kinds of movies in his career.

Maria crowns the “Tormented Woman Trilogy” for Lorrain. He achieved his goal of making a great musical biopic that brought this woman to audiences who may not have known her or followed opera. Angelina Jolie gives the best performance of her career as this woman who is struggling with many aspects of her life. The celebrity and personal sides of her life were both dealt with in as good of a way as I possibly could have imagined.  Jolie gives everything she has in her acting arsenal in this role. I was genuinely emotionally invested in the character of Maria Callas I was watching. Jolie would be my pick to win the Best Actress Oscar at next year’s Academy Awards if I were a voter. She’s masterful in this role. Add in the brilliant cinematography by Lackman and you have one of the best biopics I’ve ever seen. I loved this film and the performance by Jolie!

4 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen