Maria review: Angelina Jolie is stunning as Maria Callas in her last days

Running time: 123 minutes. Rated R (some language including a sexual reference).In some theaters.Near the end of “Maria,” 53-year-old Maria Callas, the opera diva stunningly played by Angelina Jolie, attempts to make it through the challenging mad scene from “Anna Bolena” in an empty Paris theater.Like poor Anne Boleyn, these are the final, messy days of her life.

But the singer’s executioner is her frustrating inability to deliver.“Audiences expect miracles,” Maria says.“I can no longer perform them.”Callas, so adept at the physical and vocal rigors of operatic mad scenes she released an entire album of them, gets a cinematic one in the form of Pablo Larraín’s affecting psychological biopic — a requiem for arguably the greatest soprano of all time.As Callas so devastatingly starts to lose it, “Maria” satisfyingly stirs our insides in the mysterious way an opera does.   The visually sumptuous film begins with Maria being found dead on the floor in 1977 France, where she spent her last years.

Yet Larraín gives the narrative some hopeful drive as, in the seven days prior, she decides she wants to sing again — not as a comeback, but just to regain her lost voice.To once again become La Callas.The soprano’s diminished instrument, still pretty to the untrained ear, has fallen from its stratospheric peak due to a mix of debated factors: 80-pound weight loss, a quaalude-like drug called Mandrax and a lack of confidence in middle age.Maria’s lonely. She’s single following a relationship with the now-dead Aristotle Onassis, and keeps only the company of her butler (Pierfrancesco Favino), housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and two poodles.

“Ninety-nine percent of you wants food, and one percent is love,” she says to the dogs.Without music, she has nothing.

Not eating as she pops pills like M&Ms, Maria’s addled mind hallucinates that an interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is speaking to her...