Million Dollar Baby: Critic Reviews

A classic.

It may be a classically staged tale of an underdog's triumph, but each scene is packed with authentic feeling.

Clint Eastwood's drama about a grizzled boxing trainer and a spunky young fighter is the best movie released by a major Hollywood studio this year.

As good as Unforgiven. Or, to put it another way, as good as any movie Eastwood has ever directed.

The result is the kind of movie they don't make anymore -- a real crowd-pleaser.

As Maggie, Swank is a package of dynamite, a determined soul with too much to prove and too little time to do it in, to worry about defeat. Eastwood is so good in this movie, it almost feels like cheating.

It is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece.

Eastwood's point of view has been seasoned enough to locate poignancy and respect for his protagonists where you least expect -- saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment.

A movie that approaches the level of great boxing films, like Raging Bull, by using sport as a metaphor for human nature.

When you think you know its moves, it throws in fancy footwork. Then it sucker-punches you when you're not looking.

Million Dollar Baby is one for the books. It could have gone wrong in ways that would reduce it to a series of stereotypes. But it never does.

Confident, powerful, a thing of deceptively effortless beauty, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby shifts its weight in the late rounds -- having seduced us with a gritty underdog tale -- and delivers a body blow.

Joins the honor list of great fight films.

Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is a masterpiece, pure and simple, deep and true.

One of Eastwood's best.

The performances of the three leads are perfect, so we don't care that we don't know what lies right outside the Hit Pit.

The new picture takes its time, gives its actors room to breathe, and isn't afraid to strike a hokey note if it reveals something important. Real life, after all, is full of hokiness.

It's a story about passion and dedication to a dream. It's a story about the need to believe in yourself and what you're doing. It's a story about lost opportunities and second chances.

It's a weeper, a fighter, a dreamer of a film that treads on ground that's been fairly trampled over the years. It should stink. Instead, it's flat-out wonderful.

Saying this movie is about boxing is akin to saying Citizen Kane is about a sled.

No movie in my memory has depressed me more than Million Dollar Baby.

An unsettling and unforgettable masterpiece of skid-row poetry that punctures the heart.

Slow-burning drama of a determined female boxer and her hard-shelled trainer, a tale Eastwood invests with rewarding reserves of intimacy, tragedy, tenderness and bitter life knowledge.

Eastwood scores a knockout as an actor and director with Million Dollar Baby, a spare, exquisitely realized masterpiece about faith, redemption and boxing that beautifully illustrates his longtime philosophy that 'less is more.'

[A] solid boxing drama.