Changeling

A frustrating (in a powerful way) look at early 20th-Century LA, run by corrupt police and its Gun Squad. A woman comes home to find her child is gone, the police do nothing and later return to her a boy. For the next hour and a half, Angelina says, "He's not my son," with varying degrees of volume and emphasis. (Angie here has two acting volumes: muted and LOUD.) No one listens, except a John Malkovichian pretentious pastor. The press is in the police department's pocket, and she is sent to the hospital as a crazy woman. Powerful stuff.

Then she's released, and the compelling stuff ends. The last fourth of the movie is a procedural tying up of loose ends: what happens during the police hearings, what happens to the killer. With all due respect, the story here is a corrupt police force ruining this woman's life. It's not the people who may have killed her son. That's a side story, tangential to what's good, and the ending drags down an otherwise great Clint Eastwood film.