Quite good, but hardly a Top250 film...

Rating: 7/10 (11 April 2009)

...Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" suffers mostly from being a tad over-long and perhaps a bit too Oscar-hungry for its own good. Angelina Jolie does a nice job playing against stereotype, and Eastwood's direction is as confident and assured as we've all grown to expect, the production values are top of the line, longtime Eastwood conspirator/DP Tom "Blood Work" Stern's camera-work is beautiful and mostly understated, letting Eastwood tell the tale without undue showiness, and the ensemble work of Jolie, etal. is of a piece, even the kids. J. Michael "Babylon 5" Straczynski's screenplay is reasonably taut given the necessary attention to a lot of detail to make sense of the case (and let Jolie complete her character arc), but could have been tightened further. The brilliant John Malkovich is mostly wasted in a role that could almost have been written out, but I suppose a paycheck is a paycheck. I'm bemused by the heavily international weight of the current IMDb voting bloc for "Changeling," but as it penetrates home video, I imagine that will change.
I'd have liked to have seen a stronger thematic attention to the parallels between the institutional abuse suffered by Mrs. Collins and the equally tragic abuse suffered by her son and the other children. Strange, isn't it, that we attribute distinctive personal failure to the latter, but tend to lose our focus on individual responsibility when it comes to systemic failures? I'll definitely be looking forward to seeing what Mr. Straczynski does with "World War Z," a zombie apocalypse novel I enjoyed a great deal.