At The Movies: Be immersed in arty psychodrama Maria, meta thriller-comedy Broken Rage

Maria (PG13)

123 minutes, opens on Feb 20
★★★☆☆

The story: Angelina Jolie scales the high notes, portraying American-Greek soprano goddess Maria Callas in the final week of her life.

Callas concludes Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s Hollywood triptych of sad, lonely 20th-century female icons that encompasses American First Lady Jackie Kennedy in Jackie (2016) and Princess Diana in Spencer (2021).

La Divina, “The Divine One”, was the supreme diva of opera. Maria opens and closes with her death at age 53 in 1977 Paris where she has retreated, her voice and career in decline.

In the seven days between, she recounts her impressionistic biopic to an interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee). He is named Mandrax, like her prescription drug, and a hallucinatory effect of her addiction.

Together, they stroll the city in exploration of her interiority. There are monochrome flashbacks to her traumatic teens (played by Aggelina Papadopoulou) in Greece and her tabloid affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who would leave her for the widowed Kennedy as if this were a Larrain multiverse.

Her maid (Alba Rohrwacher) and her butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) are her sole, devoted companions back in her penthouse, helplessly watching her languish on a diet of sedatives until she is so emaciated, she is all brocaded gowns plus a pair of eyes.

She is a spectre in her own beautifully mounted but hollow ghost story. Nothing here feels real. Jolie’s self-destructive, narcissistic, delusional and imperious interpretation of the heroine is performative.

Most jarring are her lip-synced overdubs of Callas’ original recordings.

This may seem a technicality given the actress’ dedication – she had seven months of vocal training – as well as the resplendent cinematography and production designs, except singing was what defined Callas.

Hot take: Where is her passion? Her vitality? This psychodrama on opera’s prima donna compensates with arty aesthetics.

Broken Rage (NC16)

67 minutes, available on Prime Video
★★★☆☆

The story: Japanese show-business icon Takeshi Kitano wrote, directed, edited and stars – twice – as an ageing gun-for-hire caught between the cops and the criminal underworld.

The Tokyo assassin Mr Mouse (Kitano) receives his assignments in unlabelled envelopes from a local coffee shop. Nabbed by the police, he is dropped into a drug cartel to work undercover in exchange for his freedom.

Broken Rage is this violent mob yarn, one that ends and immediately repeats itself scene for scene as a knockabout farce. The icy professional is now a whimpering buffoon who trips, slips, executes the wrong man and accidentally sets his apartment on fire.

He also, somehow, finds himself in a surreal game of musical chairs.

Kitano was, of course, the comic phenomenon Beat Takeshi, long before he was an internationally renowned auteur of modern yazuka classics such as Boiling Point (1990), Sonatine (1993) and Hana-bi (1997). This duology – the featurette was commissioned by Prime Video exclusively for streaming – is his 1970s alter ego taking the mickey out of his latter-day tough guy persona and gangster cinema in general.

Golden Globe winner Tadanobu Asano from Shogun (2024 to present) and Nao Omori pair up as the hard-boiled detectives opposite yakuza bosses played by Shido Nakamura and Hakuryu. All of them Kitano’s beloved repertory players, they barely conceal their amusement at the deadpan joke behind their stock characters.

It is indeed utterly absurd, complete with a simulated on-screen live chat roasting the movie’s cheap production values.

For Kitano, humour and violence have always been inextricable, and the insouciant self-parody is as much the 78-year-old’s late-career summation of his dual personality.

Hot take: This meta thriller-comedy is two-for-one entertainment with an idiosyncratic Beat.