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,

Jolie, whose combination of artistry and larger-than-life stardom makes her the only actress who could play this part right now, is luminous.

“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.

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.

Angelina Jolie’s transformation into opera legend Maria Callas for Pablo Larraín’s Maria marked more than a return to acting. It was a deeply personal journey into vulnerability, strength and emotional excavation.