Changeling: Taking his sweet time as usual, Clint Eastwood directed this 1920s period piece about a Los Angeles single mom (Angelina Jolie) who gets put through the ringer for insisting that the boy returned to her by the LAPD is not her son, who mysteriously disappeared five months before. Jolie has never seemed more vulnerable, but the movie itself is a little cut and dried, a true-crime B-movie tricked out like an Oscar-bait A-movie.
Choke: Sam Rockwell is magnificently scuzzy in this movie version of Chuck Palahniuk's gut-bucket novel, where he plays a sex addict who fakes the need for a Heimlich maneuver in restaurants so that people will hold him for a few moments and perhaps send cash later out of concern for his well-being. Angelica Huston plays the crazy-lady mom who may have screwed up his life forever, and writer-director Clark Gregg somehow gets all this madness and longing up there on the screen.
