Maria
Netflix | Release Date: November 27, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
63
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 50 Critic Reviews
Positive:
30
Mixed:
20
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
91
Entertainment WeeklyMaureen Lee LenkerSep 4, 2024
This is a portrait of all that an artist must sacrifice for their work and the ways that is amplified further as a female artist. It's a fable of fame and control, but it's also an ode to a woman who could only find peace by singing her heart out. Read full review
90
We Got This CoveredFrancisca TinocoDec 12, 2024
Maria is a triumph and the culmination of a trilogy that has become a definitive and essential dissection of the celebrity biopic genre. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyNov 27, 2024
With "Maria," about the final days of the iconic American-Greek soprano Maria Callas, Larraín turns his "historic women" movies into a near-perfect trilogy, giving us a stunning conclusion to his series. Read full review
88
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiNov 27, 2024
As Callas so devastatingly starts to lose it, “Maria” satisfyingly stirs our insides in the mysterious way an opera does. Read full review
85
TheWrapSteve PondAug 29, 2024
In a movie that is stately on the surface and stormy underneath, Jolie’s drawn, almost architectural features and air of enforced restraint is ideal for Larraín’s vision of Callas. She’s a glorious, luminous wreck, looking for peace but drawn inexorably to a world of grand artifice. Read full review
80
Little White LiesHannah StrongJan 10, 2025
There’s an ethereal quality to Jolie’s performance that matches Callas’ legendary persona, and despite the deep sense of melancholy that pervades the film like a ghostly veil, this is still a love story – and one where the heroine lives forever. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawJan 8, 2025
Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana. Read full review
80
EmpireJohn NugentDec 20, 2024
La Diva Eterna lives in Jolie, with a performance as towering as it is understated: sad and soulful and heartbreaking. She has never been better. Brava! Read full review
80
SlashfilmJeremy MathaiOct 4, 2024
Practically every immaculate shot in Maria is framed as if it were the title character's own theater stage. This makes an apt runway for Angelina Jolie to do her thing and deliver easily her most dialed-in performance of the last decade (or more). Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreySep 4, 2024
Maria is a tragedy, but not because of one of life’s piteous events. Instead it’s the tragedy of a woman’s failure to heal her wounds with her art. Read full review
80
Time OutKaleem AftabAug 29, 2024
This enjoyable biopic offers a loving and affectionate portrait of Callas that never airbrushes her foibles. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeAug 29, 2024
Jolie’s fragile brilliance is not to be questioned. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinAug 29, 2024
Jolie is given ample space to dazzle, but less to surprise. Dazzle she does though, with a fine understanding of just how camp she can go without proceedings becoming too operatic for their own good. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksAug 29, 2024
Midway through, I was all set to file this as a posturing distraction, destined for a life as a high-camp curio. But it ground me down, won me over and by the closing credits, God help us, I was hoping for an encore. Read full review
75
Washington PostTy BurrNov 27, 2024
Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrNov 27, 2024
Is it all a little much? Of course, but that’s kind of the point of Maria. Read full review
75
Original-CinKim HughesNov 26, 2024
For a biopic about Maria Callas, one of opera’s most vivacious personalities, director Pablo Larraín’s visually sumptuous Maria is unusually downbeat. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 25, 2024
This is an exquisitely filmed and at times deeply melancholy portrait of an artist who had once made the rafters of great opera houses hum with her bel canto technique and had been mobbed by fans and adored by millions, but spent her last week surrounded by the echoes of sadness. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 22, 2024
Maria, despite being occasionally slow, is a weird, good movie. Read full review
75
Paste MagazineLuke HicksOct 3, 2024
The history baked into Maria is fascinating, one of the film’s greatest strengths. Read full review
75
The Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeAug 29, 2024
Maria is most truly involved with its subject when it abandons any impulse to scale her down, to reduce a titan to life-size, and opts instead to remember the singer as grandiose, allowing her memory — and Jolie’s perfectly suited performance of that memory — to fill the biggest screen. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicAmanda LubertoNov 25, 2024
Maria rounds out the trilogy of important women in the 20th century in consummate fashion. Lorraín sticks to his melodic style while highlighting an undeniable actress of our time, this time with Angelina Jolie. Read full review
70
LooperAudrey FoxAug 30, 2024
The film as a whole may be too sedate and ploddingly paced for some — a piano being moved back and forth, over and over again, across an elegant but lonely Parisian apartment, both literally and figuratively. But it's impossible to deny the raw emotional power of Jolie in the lead role. Read full review
70
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganAug 29, 2024
Larrain uses the familiar narrative structure of the flashback and adds some operatic grace notes to deliver a performance-led film that is never less than expected – but also never less than watchable. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyAug 29, 2024
The movie is like a glittering jewel in a glass showcase, inviting you to look but not touch. Read full review
67
The Film StageRory O'ConnorAug 30, 2024
Larraín keeps much of the film quiet, and as a result Maria can feel a little empty: a conceptual touch, perhaps, but one that leaves Knight’s script and Jolie’s performance (presence to burn, a bit limited for interiority) with a lot of heavy-lifting. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 29, 2024
Larraín’s freeform portrait of the diva’s final days seldom feels like more than a libretto: passionately sung, but lacking the detail and fullness needed to bring it to life. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreDec 16, 2024
What one is left with is a gorgeous, quiet and tragic appreciation of Callas. Read full review
63
ObserverRex ReedDec 12, 2024
Maria is not a terrible movie, just a big disappointment. Read full review
63
USA TodayBrian TruittDec 11, 2024
The melodrama is packed with more style – so, so much style – than narrative substance, though Jolie...fully commits to the role both emotionally and musically. Read full review
60
NMEJordan BassettNov 1, 2024
Maria is both winningly camp and a little too po-faced for its own good, apparently unsure if it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek or deadly serious. Read full review
60
BBCNicholas BarberAug 29, 2024
Throughout the film, various people draw a distinction between "Maria" the woman and "La Callas" the superhuman diva. Its title notwithstanding, Maria is definitely about "La Callas". Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanAug 29, 2024
Maria bears many of the hallmarks of Larraín’s lavish empathy and filmmaking skill. Yet the movie, in contrast, is driven by a dramatic fatalism that does it little favor. Read full review
60
Screen RantAlex HarrisonAug 29, 2024
There's plenty to admire in Maria, and in Jolie's performance, but my connection to certain scenes shouldn't be mistaken for my being emotionally engrossed. In fact, I typically felt kept at a distance. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerOct 3, 2024
The dueling personas of Jolie and Callas adds a dimension of time-spanning kinship to Maria that it might not have had if it had starred an actress with less publicized personal baggage. Saddled with the pasts of two world-renowned stars, Maria is more like an emblem of the burden of fame than a dissection of the humanity at its core. Read full review
58
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossAug 29, 2024
By creating — and persisting — on this on-the-nose parallel between the tragedy of opera and the one of Callas’s life, the duo sees this woman solely through the tragic value of her woes, denying her talent and her craft from the light that is true human connection, built not only through shared griefs but the deep understanding of one another that only great art can promote. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonDec 5, 2024
As the plot swings haphazardly between drug-induced hallucinations and reality, we lose trust in what we are seeing. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Aparita BhandariDec 5, 2024
By focusing his lens on the personality of the diva, as opposed to her artistry, Larrain doesn’t truly give us insight into what made Maria into “La Callas.” We get glimpses of the tragedies and scandals in her life that inspired and informed her powerful – and often divisive – vocals. But we don’t understand the artistry behind the voice. Read full review
50
ABC NewsPeter TraversDec 1, 2024
Angelina Jolie fires up the best actress Oscar race as opera legend Maria Callas, but director Pablo Larraín's muffled cinematic take on the prima donna’s last days commits the cardinal sin that Callas never did as an artist by leaving us on the outside looking in. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonNov 28, 2024
I wish Larraín had cut Callas down to size more. He’s too protective of his fellow artist to slosh around in the fury that fueled her art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineKyle TurnerOct 2, 2024
Between Jackie, Spencer, and, now, Maria, Pablo Larraín has thrice committed the cardinal sin of taking a female icon of the 20th century and, in an attempt to hold a mirror up to her multitudes, flattened her into the equivalent of a kitschy postage stamp. Read full review
50
ColliderMartin TsaiAug 30, 2024
Pablo Larraín's Maria is a one-note exploration of another public figure that just makes the same points over and over again. Read full review
50
Vanity FairRichard LawsonAug 29, 2024
Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film. Read full review
50
TimeStephanie ZacharekAug 29, 2024
Maria is a movie made with great respect, almost adulation, but very little that qualifies as real feeling. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreAug 29, 2024
Despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonDec 12, 2024
Screenwriter Steven Knight has much to answer for in Callas being quite so shrill, but Ms. Jolie is unable to turn her storied character—one of opera’s most important and influential performers, a woman of polarizing voice, scandalous history and tempestuous personality—into something recognizably human. Read full review
40
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonDec 12, 2024
What we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way. Read full review
40
The New YorkerRichard BrodyNov 25, 2024
Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance. Read full review
40
The Daily BeastBarry LevittAug 30, 2024
Maria is a swirling, fragmented recollection of Callas’ life, one that leaves things frustratingly on the surface. Read full review
40
The TimesKevin MaherAug 29, 2024
This is a film fed by, and consistently cutting to, the operas that defined its subject. Yet there is not a single moment that is emotionally operatic. It is wilfully, wearily flat. Read full review
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