Angelina Jolie never expected to hit all the notes. But finding the breath of Maria Callas was enough to bring things out of Jolie that she didn’t even know were in her.

“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.

To the generations of opera singers that came after her, she’s still an era-defining consummate artist. “She’s an icon. There’s no other way to put it,” said bass Morris Robinson, who recently sang the role of Ramfis in “Aida” with Boston Lyric Opera.

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.

The important thing to know going into “Maria” is that it’s the third in a trilogy of films directed by the Chilean whirlwind Pablo Larraín that seek to recover the women behind the plaster saints of 20th-century iconography.

Angelina Jolie’s performance as legendary opera singer Maria Callas in director Pablo Larraín’s 'Maria' seems likely to return her to serious acting awards contention.

And for the first time in years, Jolie is back in the spotlight, in full movie-star mode. Her commanding performance in “Maria” seems assured