Director: Clint Eastwood, 15, 141min

Stars: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan

On general release

Just what is Eastwood on? How does a director who is in his late seventies, and was once known as a sharpshooting film cliché, get better with every film?

Changeling, like Letters from Iwo Jima before it, is a mature, thoughtful and sometimes brutal film that casts a cold eye on the past but sends shivers through the present. Child abuse and child killing are the subjects here, yet they are seen through the prism of a so-bizarre-it-has-to-be-true real-life police corruption scandal from 1928.

Meticulously researched by the writer and former journalist J. Michael Straczynski, who lifted 90 per cent of the dialogue directly from court records, it tells the story of a single suburban mom called Christine Collins (Jolie), whose son Walter is kidnapped from their LA home in March, 1928.

Some months later, the LAPD announce that her son has been found alive. But there is a problem – Collins, convinced that this new boy is a fake (he doggedly claims to be her son, despite the obvious physical differences and the fact that his old teacher doesn’t recognise him), challenges the police captain J.J. Jones (Donovan) in the belief that he is lying. A battle of wills ensues, but Collins is told that she is crazy and is shipped off to an asylum for the criminally insane.

Collins finds a defender in an anticorruption minister, the Reverend Gustav Briegleb (Malkovich). But all the while the fate of Walter slowly unfolds on camera, grimly mixed up in the child-killing horror of the “Wineville Chicken Coop Murders”.

Of course, impressive though Eastwood is, none of this would work without Jolie at the centre. An actress who often undersells herself as a pout on legs, she here veers from saintly to vengeful to broken with effortless grace. She is, in other words, outstanding, and reason alone to see the film.

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