Changeling: Critic Reviews

The oldfangled deliberateness of Eastwood's style has backfired this time, only adding to the sense that though you may not have heard this particular story before, you already know everything that's coming.

When it works best, Changeling is a feverish and bluntly effective parable of wronged innocence.

Despite Ms. Jolie's hard work and Mr. Eastwood's scrupulous attention, [Jolie's] difficult, fairly one-dimensional character fails to take hold.

What a bold, virile, operatic piece of film-making from this 78-year-old director. He is now well into a remarkable late period, and I sense we ain't seen nothing yet.

While the neo-Gothic tale is inherently intriguing, the film should inspire strong emotion, but deliberate pacing and a contained sense of melodrama make it a surprisingly passive experience.

Eastwood overcompensates for the movie's meandering with a succession of hysterics -- from men, women, and children.

Image trumps performance.

The script is compelling, the direction confident, the production values professional. But it does not, in the end, feel real.

Connections are missing or scrambled between the filmmaking and the period, between the co-stars, Angelina Jolie and John Malkovich, and between the characters they play.

Changeling may be the most beautiful horror film ever made; it may also be the most boring.

The way Eastwood shoves Jolie's suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: 'And the Oscar WILL go to ... ' She's a great actress. She doesn't need his domineering chivalry.

Changeling is beautifully wrought, but it has the abiding fault of righteously indignant filmmaking.

It has not a single unnecessary stylistic flourish. No contrived dramatics. No shocking stunts.

Eastwood, working from a script by J. Michael Straczynski, tells a painful true story neatly and well, with one foot in rousing Hollywood melodrama and the other in a story that resists tidy resolution.

This incredible but true story marks the first time Eastwood's signature themes have found expression in a woman's experience, and the absence of any distracting machismo only heightens his sense of helpless rage.

With its many tonal shifts and dangling subplots, J. Michael Straczynski's sprawling script is a problem. Jolie's performance is another.

Changeling is a brilliant, demanding film, a mystery-cum-character study about which we finally have to make up our own minds.

It is a misfire, a silly and borderline absurd story that cannot excuse its twists and turns with the simple 'a true story' declaration that opens the film.

Changeling is a fine-enough movie. It's just that it's aware of the fact, and neither Eastwood nor Jolie ever lets the audience forget it.

Mr. Eastwood, particularly, with his finely honed noirish instincts, should have sprinted more and cantered less.

Changeling is the real deal, as good as any film [Eastwood] has ever made, and 10 times more electrifying than most. It grabs you by the throat and never lets go.

Emotionally powerful and stylistically sure-handed.

Changeling is another remarkable addition to Eastwood's directorial canon.

If the film is too long and a little unwieldy in its later acts, the consummate craftsman in Eastwood glosses over that with detail and righteous rage.

Changeling reminds us that the veneer of civilization is thin and made of quicksilver.