Million Dollar Baby

TNR's Christopher Orr sums up the mixed blessings of Eastwood's latest flick adroitly:

Million Dollar Baby ... ought to be a cheap exercise in audience manipulation. But it's not--or rather, it's not only that. 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.

That's about right. Kinda how I felt about Mystic River, too, which I thought an even better film.