On Angelina Jolie

From 03.24.25 to 04.23.25 I spent 31 days catching up on every adult-aged scripted project Angelina Jolie has had a role in. I hadn't planned on doing so, but it made sense once it started.

Movie Marathon Month (2025) Full List

In 2023, with a renewed interest in actually watching movies, I came up with Movie Marathon Month: watching at least one movie a day for 31 consecutive days. For the past two years there wasn't a unifying theme between the selections, although there were some whole franchises watched (2023: Starship Troopers; 2024: Taxi (French)). However, as I found myself watching both Wanted and Hackers again earlier in the year, I realized that Jolie's filmography was a major cinematic blind spot for me.

After it was all said and done, I walked away with a few notes of interest.

• Given my age, my mental image of Jolie was always post-Tomb Raider... Mr. & Mrs. Smith/Wanted Angelina Jolie to be specific. I had seen a few things like Hackers and Gone in 60 Seconds before, but I was too young for it to really stick in any meaningful way. Which is to say, I was almost entirely unfamiliar with the younger, dramatic, and frequently topless, Jolie. I knew she won her Oscar for Girl, Interrupted but I had never seen it. Nor had I seen the other 2 projects she had won the first 2 Golden Globes of her 3peat for, George Wallace and Gia. Each of them are performances worthy of the awards she won, but Gia was the standout for me from the early part of her career. It's crazy to think it's largely only remembered for her nudity at this point. It definitely deserves a better legacy than that.

• Angelina Jolie has done A LOT of roles in different accents. Several British roles, French, Italian, Russian, Eastern European, Macedonian, Southern, New Yorker... she never shied away from going for it. They don't all work well, but I applaud the effort nonetheless. She has even said that she finds herself slipping into her British accent on accident in her day to day life now.

• This is somehow the most surprising one to me. The first two came from simply not knowing something, but for this I found my opinion being actively changed. I think Maleficent is Jolie's best role to date. I had originally written off the Maleficent movies from not caring for Disney's attempt to humanize their villains (it's okay for evil to just be evil), but I was oh so wrong to do that. Both of them are just plain old good fun. I'm not a particularly big fan of Elle Fanning, but she really balances everything out perfectly up against Jolie.

My single biggest takeaway from Jolie Month is that I hope Maleficent 3 isn't stuck in development hell, because I need it more than I've ever needed another Disney movie. Someone please turn off the MCU and "live-action" remake machines, and boot the Maleficent machine back up.

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