Kritiken

his is Clint at his best: giving a beautifully nuanced performance himself, allowing Freeman and the rest of the cast enough time and space to fully inhabit their roles, eliciting an Oscar-worthy performance from Swank, and executing the whole thing with a classical grace, clarity and integrity seldom seen in modern mainstream cinema.

He [Eastwood] has never done anything better as actor or director. Million Dollar Baby is a model of what a commercial yet non-dumbed-down Hollywood film should be.

For all its clichés and hamfisted metaphors and overwrought melodrama, there is a grim magnificence to the film, a seriousness of purpose that elevates it not only above the schlock it might easily have been, but into the upper tiers of recent American film.

Million Dollar Baby is a measured movie, deeply involving us in its characters and their problems and played with immense feeling and grace by Eastwood, Swank and Freeman.

Eastwood produces and directs a film which gets under your guard in the final rounds with some emotional jabs and a sharp anti-clerical uppercut. A heartfelt, creditable picture.

We may have heard something like it before, heard Freeman’s voiceover, seen Eastwood’s snarl, seen plenty of other heads hit the canvas ­ but the story is told and performed with such conviction that nothing’s quite like it.

This picture is smaller and more concerned with the fates of individuals than with the workings of family and community, but if anything, the shadows of authentic tragedy fall more deeply over its hushed, intimate spaces.

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

Like a very fine wine,Clint Eastwood is getting better with age... The movie, a melancholy, beautifully judged three-hander, displays - better than ever before- his extraordinary gifts for expertly-paced storytelling, precise characterisation and compassionate studies of human frailty.

As if “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River” weren’t grave enough, this endlessly resourceful filmmaker goes just as dark and deep in this 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.

As a boxing movie, this is every bit as grim as The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City(1972), and as an underlit look at a seedy American subculture, set mainly in a few lairlike locations, it's as dark and doom ridden as the 1961 The Hustler (with which it paradoxically shares a ‘Scope format) and Eastwood's own 1988 Bird.