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. Eastwood mines gold for each and every character: charting the powerful bonds that develop between "white-trash" Missouri waitress and aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), her reluctant trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), and training-gym partner Eddie "Scrap-Iron" Dupris (Morgan Freeman). --Jeff Shannon