Changeling: A child secretly exchanged for another

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2009)

(There are Spoilers) Coming home from work at the L.A Telephone Company, where she's a supervisor, Christine Collins, Angelina Jolie, finds that her nine year old son Water, Gaittin Griffith, had gone missing.
Going to the police to file a missing persons report Christine runs into the first of many horrors she suffers throughout the film in the police's indifference to finding her son Walter. It's when the police finally locate Walter some five months later in a diner at far off DeKalb Illinois that Christine's problems, instead of ending, star to intensify. The boy isn't her missing son Walter and what's more the L.A police-who took the credit in locating and returning "Walter" to her-in wanting to finally close the case insist that he is! So much so that they have Christine committed to an insane asylum when she refuses to go along with them!
True story about the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders committed by the deranged Gordon Northcott, Jason Butler Hanner,back in 1928 that stunned the entire nation. The person who unknowingly uncovered these ghastly ax murders-Christine Collins-almost ended up being committed for life in an insane asylum by the very police who's job it was to solve them. It was when L.A Det. Lester Ybarra, Michael Kelly, interviewed this 15 year-old Canadian runaway Sandford Clark, Eddie Anderson, that the truth-about the ax murders- finally saw he light of day. It was Sandford who identified a photo of Walter Collins as one of his crazed Uncle Gordon's victims that cracked the case wide open. Uncovering the victims, as many as 20, at the Northcott Ranch not only leads to the arrest of Gordon Northcott but the indictment of the L.A police in their total incompetence in not chasing down the clues,in the case of the missing Walter Collins, that may have prevent any more murders from happening.
****SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT DOWN**** Besides the tragic story about the missing Walter Collins-who in fact was never found dead or alive- and what his mother Christine went through to find him the "Changeling" also shows the amount of corruption that existed in the LAPD back then and how it allowed, with the police participating in it, crime to get out of hand in the "City of Angels".
Gordon Northcott who was sentenced to be executed at San Quentin Prison was still up to his old tricks when he, from his cell in solitary confinement, sent Christine a telegram expressing remorse for his crimes and willing to tell her if her son Walter was in fact one of his victims. This lead to one of the most explosive scenes in the entire movie with Christine, while visiting him in a holding cell with a prison guard present, smacked Northcott silly when she realized that he was, by pulling her leg in what he knew about Walter, just extending her suffering for his own sick and perverted pleasure! As for Northcott he was to meet his maker the very next morning, on the San Quentin gallows, and that, unlike his sickening game of cat and mouse he played with Christine the previous day, was nothing for him to laugh about!