Million Dollar Baby

Production year: 2004

Drama PG-13   Running time: 2:12 

IMDB rating:   8.1     Aspect: Wide;  Languages: English, French;  Subtitles: English, French, Spanish;  Audio: DD 5.1

Clint Eastwood's 25th film as a director, Million Dollar Baby stands proudly with Unforgiven and Mystic River as the masterwork of a great American filmmaker. In an age of bloated spectacle and computer-generated effects extravaganzas, Eastwood turns an elegant screenplay by Paul Haggis (adapted from the book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner by F.X. Toole, a pseudonym for veteran boxing manager Jerry Boyd) into a simple, humanitarian example of classical filmmaking, as deeply felt in its heart-wrenching emotions as it is streamlined in its character-driven storytelling. In the course of developing powerful bonds between "white-trash" Missouri waitress and aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), her grizzled, reluctant trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), and Frankie's best friend and training-gym partner Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman), 74-year-old Eastwood mines gold from each and every character, resulting in stellar work from his well-chosen cast. Containing deep reserves of love, loss, and the universal desire for something better in hard-scrabble lives, Million Dollar Baby emerged, quietly and gracefully, as one of the most acclaimed films of 2004, released just in time to earn an abundance of year-end accolades, all of them well-deserved.

Director

Features

Featurettes/Behind-The-Scenes/Documentaries
Interviews
Trailers/TV spots

Special features

James Lipton Takes on Three (Roundtable with Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman and Moderator James Lipton)
Born To Fight (Examines the parallels of the movie to real-life boxer Lucia Rijker)
Producers Round 15: Behind the Scenes
Million Dollar Baby