MARIA

Angelina Jolie gives a marvelously delicate performance as the aging songbird confronting the abyss of her voiceless future. With outstanding cinematography from Ed Lachman spanning eras, moods, and capturing the great opera halls, Pablo Larraín envisions the last week of the opera star’s life in Paris as a hallucinatory cavalcade of prismatic recollections of great fame and lost loves.

Like Jackie and Spencer before it, Maria indulges in acts of imagination to see beyond the spotlight of an incredibly famous woman. In this case, it’s Greek American Maria Callas, who established a new canon with the power of her voice. We meet her at the end of her life, living alone with her adoring butler, housekeeper, two dogs, an impeccable wardrobe, and buckets of prescription medications. The latter, a sedative-hypnotic called Mandrax (Quaaludes to you and I), is her favorite as it conjures a handsome young interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who becomes her virtual companion on spectacular walks around the city during which she revisits her greatest roles and her love affair with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Callas views herself as creating an autobiography from hallucinations. She goes about her days lingering in cafes for adoration and testing her ability to make a comeback, all despite a weary physician’s insistence that the physical act of singing will only conspire with her abuse of medication and neglect for nutrition to hasten her demise. Meandering by design and light on detail, it’s nothing if not a visual feast and a virtuosic performance in which Jolie transforms herself into a singular figure and communicates her steadfast determination to define herself before the final curtain call.

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

In Tehran, a father’s promotion to an investigative judge for the revolutionary court comes with the promise of better housing, dire responsibilities, and a gun for personal protection. At first, his wife sees it as a blessing, but with protests breaking out across the city and the caseload increasing it soon becomes a curse.

As he disappears into his the stresses of his work, his teen daughters watch the unfiltered view of government violence unfold through social media. The crackdowns on the streets are mirrored in a dark farce in which a family home becomes a microcosm of life under paranoid theocracy. In three taut acts, Rasoulof’s clockwork allegory pits complicity for the sake of comforts against the ultimate urgency of resistance.

NOBU

The master chef adds a requisite fawning celebrity biopic to his vast collection of restaurants, hotels, and luxury experiences. An essential piece of brand-building, the only mildly-critical voice comes from early-investor Robert De Niro who pauses to ask what all these hotel restaurants are doing for them.

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

There are definitely some entrancing moments in this diptych contrast which begins with two twenty something nurses in the hard realities of Mumbai and ends with them finding breathing room in the magic of a seaside village, but if I’m being honest with myself hour 80 and movie 13 of a film festival may not have been the ideal mindset to fully appreciate its nuances.