“I am going to tell you what happened, and I am going to keep on telling you here, every night, until someone does something about it.”

Number one: Okay, I called 2008 too early. Number two: I think it’s time I officially declare Clint Eastwood the greatest film maker of all time. I start wondering just how many more times I’m going to say this now, but I always seem to get surprised: Clint Eastwood genuinely gets better every year, and between this and Gran Torino, I’m honestly more in awe than ever. I didn’t expect much from this movie at all and its mostly due to the presence of Angelina Jolie, who has become one of those performers who with every film since Girl, Interrupted made me a fan of hers has simply become too tainted by her public persona for me to fall for any of her acting. Within mere minutes here, all that doubt was put entirely to bed – she’s every bit phenomenal as people have been saying, and then some.

It does flag and, yes, even stretches belief a little too far towards the end, even despite the “a true story” title at the start. We’re not given enough of the Canadian boy’s story, I think (at least, not soon enough), and it’s too massive a turn for it to come out of nowhere as it does. The movie’s tone veers wildly between the likes of L.A. Confidential and Silence of the Lambs (it even passes briefly through Girl, Interrupted) but Eastwood has that way of cutting out all the fat and keeping you hooked all the way. The music is typical Eastwood, literally just a smattering of themes that in any other movie would be considered overplayed, but the two main ones here just haunted me more every time they came on. It’s a chilling, painful thing to watch and I’m far less likely to see it again any time soon than Gran Torino … but it still restores my faith in movies just when I’d given up on the past year almost entirely.