The second season of “Squid Game” will be released (https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/squid-game-2-creator-sick-of-netflix-series-business-1236251673/) on December 26, and the third is expected next year.

In the case of Callas, the director decides not to play cat and mouse with the viewer and immediately reveals his cards. In the first shots, the camera slowly zooms in on a beautiful hall where people are thoughtfully walking, in the center a sheet peeks out from behind a chair: Callas died on September 16, 1977 in Paris from a heart attack. The rest of the film is the last week of the artist's life, which seems familiar from other works about the lives of talented and very unhappy people.

Callas lives alone in a huge apartment in Paris, more like a museum. Her favorite entertainment - walks around the city, memories and mountains of pills, because of which the singer constantly sees either her former lover Aristotle Onassis or non-existent journalists. Callas's last performance was some four years ago, and in the meantime she has lost both her lover and her voice, not quite having found out what she should live for. Therefore, she tries to regain her ability to sing at the cost of her health which is already gone.

On the whole, the set is rather standard for both the ZhZL genre and for Larraín himself. However, the director leaves the abstractness of "Spencer" and works with his usual artistic techniques literally. For example, one of the hallucinations from the drugs that were taken by the diva doesn't hide its psychedelic origin. It is noteworthy that he takes the form of a reporter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) - after all, Callas lives in eternal retrospect. She must always remember the best years of her life and inform somebody about it.

Otherwise, the director refuses any embellishments that "Spencer" was so abundant with, and allows himself only a small collage of frames at the beginning, as if outlining the future film in broad strokes. The camera work here is handled by Edward Lackman (Carol, The Wonderful World), who knows how to shoot costume dramas very well. Lackman and Larraín first collaborated on last year's The Count, for which the cinematographer received an Oscar nomination.

Sad scenes of the present, written in warm autumnal tones, are cut through with brief black-and-white flashbacks that sketch in crucial facts about Callas's life. After all, the prima donna of the 20th century is hardly as familiar to the masses as Lady Di and Jackie Kennedy. And the world of opera is far from the most accessible to ordinary mortals. Meanwhile, Larraín, raised on opera, chooses musical fragments with care, gradually outlining the milestone moments of Callas's career.

These small episodes carry a simple idea: pain and trauma cannot be forgotten because it is from them that music is born. Generally, the tragedy of Callas-a loved star who loses the universal adoration-is painfully well-known to everyone who has ever watched a biographical drama about the lives of artists. It is worse than the pills the singer swallows. In this case, Larraín does not add depth to an already pretty worn-out genre.

Simultaneously, Angelina Jolie touches upon this raw nerve, after all, she has an idea of the position of a star, just like Callas, she too conceals herself from prying public eyes - for the last time, the actress came before the audience on the big screen in Eternals by Chloe Zhao back in 2021.

The theatricality of what is happening is enhanced by Steven Knight's script, in which the main character does nothing but make witty comments to everyone she meets. Jolie's beauty is the perfect frame for the image of an opera diva, and the actress clearly enjoys intellectual dialogues and the lack of action scenes.

However, despite all of Jolie's efforts, Maria Callas in her performance comes off as empty and flat, as if we knew all of the heroine's sorrows and joys in advance. Ultimately, Callas, as the director himself put it, became the sum of all the tragedies she played, and somewhere behind these images, her real life was hidden, which she ultimately could not cope with. A rather sad, albeit realistic, conclusion to the trilogy.

Disclaimer: this is important, mainly because it's the first thing that Cuarón has made in seven years - he won the Golden Lion for Roma at Venice in 2018, then vanished. He subsequently began working on this series, but it took a million years to finally see the light of day. I suspect the pandemic played a role in that. Either way, this was a very highly anticipated series; Cuarón reunited with Chivo-Emmanuel Lubezki-and cast the queen herself, Cate Blanchett, in the lead-apparently a sure bet, but nope, nothing saves this show. Sadly.

The series follows a story about a successful journalist, Catherine, played by none other than Blanchett. She has a good husband, Sacha Baron Cohen; a troubled son, Kodi Smit-McPhee; a beautiful house in London; a successful job-everything seems to be going well. But one morning, she receives a package with a book in it-the story of her long-ago vacation in Italy where her husband had to interrupt the trip and return home for work, leaving Catherine alone with their five-year-old son. There, she met a 19-year-old guy. The results of that encounter are described in excruciating detail in the book. The mysterious stranger who sent it threatens to destroy Catherine's perfect life just as she once destroyed his.

The series explicitly addresses truth, its distortions, and variations. It is not a spoiler anymore to say that there is a big twist that changes the perception of everything that happened. But I must confess that, from a period in which social behavior towards victims is being re-conceived, when social roles are under reevaluation and everyone screams victim-blaming and male power, it's hard not to guess what the big plot twist is. I figured it out with the third episode, while it took four more episodes for the characters.

The agony of watching this, even leaving aside the mediocrity of the subjects touched on by the series, is unbearable. I am having a hard time saying this because Cuarón is my favorite director, and it really feels like one of those commercial projects he did just because he could. It did to him what Great Expectations did: an experience he does not like to remember. The series is from the book by René Knight of the same name, and Cuarón wrote the screenplay himself, but absolutely blew it. Almost every scene is either melodramatically voiced over to explain the characters' feelings-as I like to say, you could just read the book for that; in film or television, we should be showed rather than told.

Overall, Disclaimer proved way too melodramatic, and unfortunately, Lubezki's stylistically beautiful cinematography only enhances that melodrama. Even Blanchett becomes grating eventually. I never thought that could happen. Like most series of late, Disclaimer would have fit nicely into two hours, but since corporations gotta be corporations, they expanded this into seven episodes. #whattowatch