Changeling

Clint Eastwood, 2008 (8.2*)
This Eastwood film is probably not as perfect as others of his recent films, such as Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby, but thanks to Angelina Jolie's best performance it is still a rewarding crime-mystery film. She is the mother of a child who disappears while she is at work, and the L.A. police, who are corrupt and getting nothing but bad press, try to give her a different child to accept as her own in order to get some good press.

She refuses to accept the charade in spite of being incarcerated in an asylum by police order, and enlists as much help as possible to get to the truth. She receives much support from a local preacher with a radio show, John Malkovich, who agrees with her and drums up a storm of publicity on his radio program.

Without giving away too much, this gets pretty creepy (of the flesh crawling type), and is based on a true late 20's crime case, with only the standard "some characters are fictitious", while Clint claims that 95% of the story presented is based on historical documents. The film's only real weakness is that is runs about 20 minutes too long at 2:20, with several anticlimatic epilogues - every time you think it's over we get more followup. This story is tough to review spoiler-free.