Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s “Maria." Currently playing in select theaters and streaming on Netflix Dec. 11, “Maria," rated R, plays like an opera, grandly theatrical and evocative of a larger-than-life star.

“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.

Now comes Maria Callas’s turn — the first of Larraín’s divas to actually be a diva — and Angelina Jolie’s as well. The performance is, like the earlier two, brilliant and daring and sad; the movie itself is surprisingly inert. “Maria” is ...