Directed by: Clint Eastwood

Starring: Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Michael Kelly, Jason Butler Harner

Rated: R (for adult situations, disturbing content)

Running time: 141 minutes

Best suited for: crime drama fans, period piece fans, Eastwood (as director) fans

Least suited for: shoot'emup enthusiasts

Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" is a biographical crime drama that rates right up there with "In Cold Blood" in terms of dramatic intrigue and methodical, deliberate pacing. This isn't a thriller as much as a factual chronicle, yet the film hardly lacks for powerful moments. It may, in fact, be the year's best police drama.

Much like Eastwood's own "Mystic River" (and this one is better), "Changeling" centers around a horrific crime seen from various angles and viewpoints.

In 1928 Los Angeles, single mom Christine Collins' young son disappears. Christine (Angelina Jolie) calls the police, who are in the midst of their own scandal and appear blasé about the boy's disappearance.Days drag into weeks and then months—until one day they notify Christine that her son has been found in Illinois. With the press gathered, the police plan for a grand reunion in L.A.

But the boy they present to Christine is not her son.

That moment alone could have easily derailed the picture. How can a mother realize that a child is not hers and yet be so easily coerced by a publicity-hungry police department to take the boy home? How to convince an audience?

For those of us who don't remember 1928, L.A. might as well have been a city on another planet. Lest we forget, the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote) had been passed only eight years earlier. Working women—Christine Collins numbered among them—were considered an abnormality, perhaps even a fad. Many men considered women fragile and scatterbrained; some saw them as little more than children.

When the police chief attempts to convince Christine that she's merely in shock, that the boy is indeed her son and she should at least take him home overnight (as if he'll somehow grow on her), she demurely agrees.

Jolie—lately represented in film as a 21st century Superwoman—is terrific in her nuanced performance of a woman caught in such a nightmarish reality. As Christine Collins, she teeters between loathing this strange child in her home and her compassion as a mother, all the while realizing her own son is still missing and unlikely, now, to be found.

When Christine—with the measured patience of one who fully understands her tenuous place in society—repeatedly, politely refuses to accept the proffered lad, police captain J.J. Jones (Jeffery Donovan) has her secretly thrown into a psycho ward.

For some, this scene may be even more disturbing than the crime itself. Christine quickly sees that the only means of escape is by signing an affidavit vindicating the police and accepting the boy as her own. But she refuses.

All of which might seem to verge on B-movie melodrama if not for the fact that Christine's story is true, that the horrendous L.A. Wineville Chicken Murders happened, and, as a result of Christine Collins' eventual lawsuit, both the corrupt L.A. police department and several laws drastically changed.

For period piece lovers, Eastwood has delivered 1928 in exacting detail, setting the scene with extraordinary brush strokes of reality. It's the same kind of detail that, for me, made "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" a betterthannot Western, an authenticity that compensates for what some might call Eastwood's laconic pacing—as "The Changeling" moves at its own deliberate tempo.

Yet, as crime dramas go, it's an excellent portrayal of both victim and the system, of crime and consequence and, ultimately, retribution.