Changeling

Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie's much-awaited collaboration brings us the true story of Christine Collins (Jolie), a single mother in 1920s LA who comes home to discover her son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) is missing.

After several months of snowballing publicity, the chief of police (Colm Feore) 'reunites' Collins with a boy he claims is her son, but who Collins insists is not. Dismissed as an hysterical mother, let down by everyone from the police to the health service, she ends up in a mental institution. It eventually falls to a church minister (John Malkovich), a lawyer (Geoff Pierson) and a miraculously uncorrupt police officer (Michael Kelly) to help her out.

There is something a touch exhausting about watching actors posturing for an Oscar; in the same way that a glamour model's pouting, posing and pushing everything up front might easily be mistaken for sexy, so might such vigorous screen performances be wrongly taken for great acting.

Such is the case with Jolie - and indeed with the bulk of the movie's performances, not to mention its score and cinematography. And it's a pity. One senses that in Ms Jolie there lies a great actress, and in the truth of this story there lies a great movie - but in Changeling everything needs a whole lot of reining in. ·