'' MARIA CALLAS '' MARKS : FILM REVIEW

Despite Angelina Jolie, Maria Callas remains opaque in new biopic. There is a moment, a little way into '' Maria, '' when you realize it shares a cinematic universe with another of director Pablo Larrain's recent films.

This movie's main character is the celebrated opera singer Maria Callas [ Angelina Jolie ]. In a flashback rendered monochrome, we see the night she met the absurdly wealthy business magnate Aristotle Onassis [ Haluk Bilginer ] - and he's the future husband, we know, of Jackie Kennedy, who was the subject of Larrain's 2016 film, ''Jackie.''

Onassis, still married to his previous wife, claim he's fallen in love with Callas through his opera glasses and invited her and her husband aboard his yacht; she seems lightly amused and a little irritated.

'' There's a point where self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity,'' she tells him.

Obviously that ''cinematic universe'' is just reality : Famous people know other famous people and go the same parties and fall in love with one another.

Callas and Onassis spent nine years together before he left her for the widowed Jackie Kennedy. But in this case, the link reminds the viewer that Larrain has made a better movie in his so-called diva trilogy - better ones, actually.

In '' Jackie, '' Natalie Portman played the bereaved first lady as she carefully crafted a legend out of her assassinated husband's legacy.

'' Spencer,'' which came out in 2021, was not good - but it was interesting, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the throes of Christmastime existential crisis.

Yet ' Maria ' is a bot of a slog, even for an opera lover. Callas here is at the end of her life, and she is not well.

She lives in Paris with her long suffering butler [ Pierfrancesco Favino ] and housemaid [ Alba Rohrwatcher ], lies to them about how many pills she's taking, and hallucinates enough of her day that she qualifies as an unreliable narrator.

Her longing for Onasis, or perhaps her vision of him, is one narrative thread in '' Maria. '' Some others : her need for adulation; her fading voice; her addiction to various prescription drugs.

Her obsessive proclivity for ordering her butler to move the piano around her home; her slip-sliding memory; her refusal to listen to anyone's advice other than her own; her almost pathological insistence on dying for her art.

The World Students Society thanks Alissa Wilkinson.