Critics reviews

The remarkable story plods from A to B, with functional dialogue and non-existent character development: the heroes are all purer than pure; and the villains couldn't be more hissable if they twirled moustaches. Even the supposedly crusading heroine is just an Anxious Mother, straight from central casting.

Straczynski's script is a masterpiece of understatement and restraint, and Angelina Jolie is riveting in the central role... It's still rare to see a film built around an actress like this, but Jolie is more than up to the task. She disappears into Christine, giving us somebody who is physically vulnerable, naive, and terrified half out of her wits, yet who is also brave, resourceful and utterly convincing.

Eastwood's grim handling of even grimmer subject matter could have used some paring down toward its histrionic ending, but Changeling is still one of the director's most assured and engaging historical horror shows.

Eastwood, at the peak of his artful powers, tightens the screws of suspense without ever forgetting where the heart of his film lies. Lesser hands might let the story sink into teary sentiment. Not Eastwood and Jolie. In saluting the warrior in Christine, star and director have made a mesmerizing film that burns in the memory.

"Changeling" is a creaky little dramatic exercise that, at the beginning at least, gives the appearance of being headed somewhere... but [Eastwood] turns every mother's nightmare into a snooze, partly because he has no idea how to guide his actors.

In other hands, [the film's] clashes of good and evil might have seemed ordinary, but Eastwood makes “Changeling” a hard story to shake off. To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one.

Changeling is a muckraker that crushes the audience under the dull weight of injustice... 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.

[Changeling] is one of the most enjoyable of [Eastwood's] recent films... [It's] a disturbing film about grim subject matter, but the overall experience is more exhilarating than saddening. There's just something satisfying about seeing a movie so well made.

Jolie, in contrast, hurtles through “Changeling” as if it were the latest installment in the Lara Croft action franchise, sustaining a pitch of intensity that turns Christine at once into a vivid icon of suffering and something of a blur. The character, as imagined in J. Michael Straczynski’s script, is as flat as a nickel... “Changeling” is by turns fascinating and frustrating, emphatic and opaque.

"Changeling" displays the directness and economy of [Eastwood's] mentor, Don Siegel. It has not a single unnecessary stylistic flourish. No contrived dramatics. No shocking stunts... This is the story of an administration that directed from the top down to lie, cheat, torture, extract false confessions and serve to protect its image. In a way, it is prophetic.

Eastwood creates a tone that's at once stately and unsettling, allowing a lot of breathing room for Jolie's sad, unyielding performance. She anchors a film that needs an anchor the further it goes along. Where much of Changeling works at once as a compelling mystery and an agonizing human drama, it starts to drift in a series of final scenes that finish the story while losing all sense of urgency.

The Changeling settles for middlebrow uplift and handsomely conventional melodrama... The Changeling doesn’t invite the viewer to share in its heroine’s disorientation, rage, and grief. Rather, it keeps us at a stately remove, presenting Christine’s suffering as a kind of religious tableau.