Film - Clint Eastwood is back in the ring with a swanky number. By Mark Kermode Million Dollar Baby (12A) Closer (15) Team America: World Police (15)

With the pre-Oscar prizefight in full swing, the 74-year-old Clint Eastwood is once more looking like a statuette contender. Having won a belated first Academy Award for directing Unforgiven in the early 1990s, and been nominated last year for helming the sober thriller Mystic River, Eastwood now makes another bid for the podium with Million Dollar Baby, an impressively unpredictable drama about female boxing on which he serves as producer, director, composer and co-star. Inspired by F X Toole's Rope Burns (and owing a cinematic debt to Karyn Kusama's low-budget indie hit Girlfight), Million Dollar Baby comes out of its corner in the first round looking like a Rocky-style "triumph of the underdog" sports pic.

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a grizzled gym owner and trainer/manager, recently dumped by his ambitious boxing prodigy and now facing career extinction. Into his life comes Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a spunky thirtysomething scrapper whom Frankie first rejects ("Girlie, tough ain't enough"), but who winds up giving him something to fight for. Narrating their surrogate father-daughter relationship is Morgan Freeman, employing the same melodious, melancholic tones that underpinned The Shawshank Redemption, and keeping a doleful eye on the proceedings as the stoical janitor for whose partial blind- ness Frankie holds himself responsible. So far, so familiar, as Maggie transforms from trailer trash to title hopeful, merrily KO'ing all comers to the gruff bemusement of her reluctant mentor. But when Maggie's fortunes take an unexpected fall, the film's broken-backed structure leads its protagonists down some narrative dead ends that deliver a body blow to upbeat audience expectations.

Notwithstanding some mawkish Gaelic nonsense (Maggie is nicknamed "Mac-ushla" and enters the ring in emerald green to the sound of bagpipes), Million Dollar Baby rewardingly subverts its feel-good cliches, opting for an understated emotional rigour that packs a far heftier dramatic wallop. Swank negotiates the shifting tones of the piece with aplomb, dancing her way through the punchy opening rounds before changing gear to weather the heavier blows of the film's third act. Eastwood, too, is in excellent form, particularly in the scenes in which Frankie torments a long-suffering neighbourhood priest as he wrestles hopelessly with his guilty demons.

Some audiences may find the modulation from light to dark disorientating, even frustrating. But it's a credit to Eastwood and writer Paul Haggis that they refuse to pull their dramatic punches, following through to the story's only possible conclusion, combining hope, heartbreak and even defeat in a manner that is rare in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Not exactly a crowd-pleaser, perhaps, but a bold jab at popular film-making that catches the audience with its guard down.

Less of a knockout is the equally highly Oscar-tipped Closer, a tale of the irritating sexual entanglements of four nauseatingly smug and thoroughly smackable characters that Mike Nichols has adapted from Patrick Marber's acclaimed stage play. Grudging plaudits to the ensemble cast, particularly Clive Owen, who slips from cheeky to chilling with apparent ease, and who adds a much-needed threatening edge. But the endless navel-gazing narcissism, self-conscious sexual frankness and gnomic cod-philosophising ("What's so great about truth? Try lying - it's the currency of the world") soon had me wishing that this quarrelsome quartet would do what they kept threatening to do and just fuck off - with or without each other.

Personally, I'd much rather spend a couple of hours in the company of Team America: World Police, the swearing, spewing, shagging puppet-heroes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's lavatorial assault on the imperialist values of modern America. When "evil Korean warlord" Kim Jong-il throws Hans Blix to his pet sharks, the TA flies in-to action, blowing up foreign countries with abandon, hampered only by the Film Actors Guild (FAG), whose protests in the end make them unknowing pawns of democratic civilisation as we know it.

Like its big-screen predecessor, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Team America: World Police makes liberal use of profanity (the words "dick", "pussy" and "ass" are inventively conjoined throughout) and boasts a couple of toe-tappingly outre musical numbers ("Everyone Has Aids"; "America, Fuck Yeah!"), none of which matches the Oscar-nominated "Blame Canada". Still, it's hard not to guffaw with glee at the gross libelling and on-screen dismemberment of an array of "aware" Hollywood stars (albeit in puppet form) and in which George W Bush's war on terror is rendered in risible sub-"Supermarionation" form. The whole thing plays like Thunderbirds Goes to Hell and will doubtless offend all those numskulls who complained about the BBC's transmission of Jerry Springer: The Opera. For that alone, it gets my vote.

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