Million Dollar Baby is emotionally gut-punching and holds up as one of the best films of the 21st century.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2024

An authentically earnest film about desperate and failed characters looking for humanity and salvation from each other, both inside and out of the ring.

| Jun 27, 2023

The characters Eastwood plays are not answerable to anyone, except themselves. As long as they pull a long face, furrow their brows and look pained after the fact, they are permitted to commit any number of crimes.

| Feb 15, 2021

Million Dollar Baby boasts wonderful acting and character writing, but a frustrating treatment of themes within a plot adapted from two short stories.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 2, 2021

As the film draws to its powerhouse close, gentle piano music by Eastwood himself gives this haunting tragedy an even higher level of poignancy.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Nov 7, 2020

Fakes you out, then knocks you flat with a right hook to the heart.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 5, 2019

Million Dollar Baby is aesthetically and emotionally a dark movie that ultimately falls short because every rough edge is softened by a cliché. Here, Eastwood throws a handful of sugar in for good measure, too.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 23, 2019

Turning the conventions of the boxing movie inside out, this sees Eastwood - as actor and director - at the top of his game.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 21, 2019

A one-man shop who even composed the muted score for his movie, Eastwood reminds us how films are best created, like Maggie's destiny in the ring, with one's own hands.

| Feb 19, 2019

Eastwood seductively draws the viewer into the world of three lonely, bruised people, to the point where the viewer becomes wholly immersed in them and their fates.

| Feb 19, 2019

The film does obliquely posit a new model of womanhood, one about risking the all-important beauty for a larger mission. But more than Maggie, the show actually belongs to the guilt-ridden Frankie...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 8, 2019

It's too bad it is nihilism dressed up as compassion.

| Mar 1, 2018

...[Clint] Eastwood teaches us his journey to achieve [respect] with modesty. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2018

In Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood makes us believe both that [the] relationship is completely surprising and wholly a product of fate.

| Feb 27, 2018

[It's] about so much more than boxing. It's about redemption, risk-taking, the search for family and God, the pursuit of a dream, a soul-shattering moral dilemma and the father-daughter relationship that develops between Frankie and Maggie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2018

As sappy and Lifetime-y as all this sounds, Eastwood's skill with the performers keeps Million Dollar Baby afloat.

| Feb 27, 2018

What moves you so powerfully at the end is not just a shattering tale of two old guys and a female boxer but, in our new millennium, a 74-year-old man's ability to tell it so powerfully without (apparently) the melancholy business of movies laying a glove

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2018

Its very conventionality is what makes it so compelling; we've seen this before, but it still gets us every time.

| Aug 24, 2017

Always one of America's most undervalued directors, Clint Eastwood is proving himself the American cinema's national treasure in the third act of his career.

| Mar 16, 2017

A heartfelt, creditable picture.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 27, 2015