I don't feel I can tell you much about Changeling until closer to release next week, except that it's a grim but rewarding watch. And that Clint Eastwood was right when he said Angelina Jolie's looks get in the way of our appreciation of her dramatic talents. She is harrowingly good as Christine Cummings, a single mother in the 1920s, whose nine-year-old son goes missing, and who has a, different, strange boy foisted on her by the corrupt and autocratic LAPD. But even in the most emotive scenes you - I - get distracted by Jolie's smoky eyes and scarlet, pillowy lips.

It's probably not helped by the fact that I saw Jolie immediately afterwards up close at the press conference for the film. Well, I say press conference, but I preferred to think of it as a tete to tete in which we just started to get to know each other. If I sound as if I've lost my reason slightly where Jolie - well, I call her Angie, obviously - is concerned, I at least have the majority of the male sex, and much of the female gender, behind me. She is indecently beautiful, but also oddly normal: quite tall, whip thin (obviously) but with a reassuring embonpoint, and seemingly far less full of guile and wariness than the average visiting star. She chatted with me - us - about her kids, and Brad, and oh my God, her blue eyes brimmed with tears when she told us how she based her performance as Christine on her late mother, Marcheline (known as 'marshmallow', she said, "because she was so soft, except where her kids were concerned"). I wish I'd proffered her the (clean) handkerchief in my pocket. I could have dried Angelina Jolie's tears. Instead, I asked her how she was feeling in herself after an emotional two years (giving birth, losing her mother) and was rewarded with a dazzling smile and a "thank you!" that made my stomach lurch with clotted longing. Then I spoiled it by asking about her grief-related weight loss on the movie (she looks almost scrawny on screen - and I was writing a health-page piece about her). She looked affronted, then hurt, and the administrator shut me down, and I felt a rush of hot shame and apologised. But at the end of the press conference, the female journalist next to me whispered: "You were right. She does look thin."