While the glamorous role of a declining opera diva would seem perfect for a star of Jolie's profile, it's undernourished by the screenplay's limited conception.

Angelina Jolie never expected to hit all the notes. But finding the breath of Maria Callas was enough to bring things out of Jolie that she didn’t even know were in her. “All of us, we really don’t realize where things land in our body over a lifetime of different experiences and where we hold it to protect ourselves,

“Maria,” Pablo Larraín’s cinematic portrait of opera legend Maria Callas, arrives as the third of the director’s films centered on iconic women of the 20th century.

Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas' short life in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria,” a dramatic, evocative elegy to the famed soprano. It’s an affair that’s at turns melancholy, biting and grandly theatrical, an aria for a once in a generation star.

Maria, the Maria Callas biopic-of-sorts starring Angelina Jolie, is directed by Pablo Larraín and written by Steven Knight.

The important thing to know going into “Maria” is that it’s the third in a trilogy of films directed by the Chilean whirlwind Pablo Larraín that seek to recover the women behind the plaster saints of 20th-century iconography.

To the generations of opera singers that came after her, she’s still an era-defining consummate artist. “She’s an icon. There’s no other way to put it,” said bass Morris Robinson, who recently sang the role of Ramfis in “Aida” with Boston Lyric Opera.

Following "Jackie" and "Spencer," director Pablo Larraín’s film is the third chapter of his trilogy about famous 20th-century women held captive by their celebrity. WBUR critic Sean Burns writes, "It’s finally a role that’s the right size for its star,