As the Civil War continues to rage, America's president struggles with continuing carnage on the battlefield and as he fights with many inside his own cabinet on the decision to emancipate the slaves.
This is a warm, celebratory film, handsomely shot, with a subtle, sympathetic central performance from Day-Lewis.
The result is a film as absorbing and unassuming as the central character.
This is handsome-looking history, but Spielberg’s worshipful treatment slows down its pulse.
Heartfelt hagiography.
As unexpected as it is intelligent, thanks to virtuoso work from Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln is landmark filmmaking, while Day-Lewis is so authentic he pulls off that stovepipe.
A rousing, rigorous and morally complex legal procedural more than a trad biopic. And all the better for it. The niggles keep accumulating after the curtains are drawn.
Handsome, often thrilling, and movingly human.
A thoughtful and thought-proving picture.
Daniel Day-Lewis is on marvellous form as Abraham Lincoln, in Steven Spielberg’s intelligent film about the battle to abolish slavery.
Lincoln confidently exorcises a theme its director has been fumbling his way around from The Color Purple(1985) through Amistad (1997), and he’s never directed a more sensational star turn.
An engaging, tightly focused political drama.
It is filmed with all necessary stately reverence by Steven Spielberg, and written by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner, with a keen ear for the delightful cadence of 19th-century oratory.
Spielberg's film will mean much to a nation that maintains a near-childlike reverence for the office of President, and it may well become one of their classroom standards. I don't think it will be embraced quite so gratefully by the rest of the world.
It’s an impeccably crafted history lesson that, unusually for a Spielberg film, tells us why its subject matter is important, instead of engaging with it on an emotional level.
Spielberg has made a moving and honourably high-minded film about this world-changing moment of American history, his best for many years: I can't imagine anyone not wanting to see it, and to experience the pleasures of something acted with such intelligence and depth.
Steven Spielberg has made more obviously entertaining and more emotionally seductive movies than Lincoln, but this is for him the most brave and, for the audience, most demanding picture in the 40 years since his emergence as a major director.
Passing an amendment wouldn’t normally make great drama but Spielberg makes it interesting by intricately surrounding the situation with engaging elements; the language, the costume, the historic context and the reverence of Day-Lewis all add to a sense of intrigue.
Lincoln: The making of a President
Can the memory of Lincoln still unite a nation?
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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