Lincoln Reviews
Top Critic'Lincoln' works as a snapshot of a great man without ever slipping into a portrait of sainthood.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This is movie magic -- history coming to life, before our eyes.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's the most remarkable movie Steven Spielberg has made in quite a spell, and one of the things that makes it remarkable is how it fulfills those expectations by simultaneously ignoring and transcending them.
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| Original Score: 5/5
Lincoln paints a powerful and compelling portrait of the man who has become an icon. We don't need to see more of his life to understand how rare a figure he was - this window is more than sufficient.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Lincoln offers proof of what magic can happen when an actor falls in love with his character. Because as great as Day-Lewis has been in his many parts, he has never seemed quite so smitten.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film masterfully captures the dual dilemmas facing the president in the final months of his life: how to bring the war between the states to an end, and how to eradicate slavery, once and for all.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Lincoln is a stirring reminder that politics can be noble. Might there be a lesson here for today's shrill D.C. discourse? 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
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| Original Score: A
Day-Lewis' voice is thin and reedy, which jibes with historical accounts but subverts our expectations. His attitude makes listeners lean in, and so do we, magnetized by his kindly reserve.
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| Original Score: 4/4
If it sounds like so much backroom politicking, it is. But it's exceptionally interesting, entertaining backroom politicking.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
The true tussle of the movie, however, is between the Spielberg who, like a cinematic Sandburg, is drawn aloft toward legend and the Spielberg who is tugged down by Kushner's intricate screenplay toward documentary grit.
"A richly detailed interpretation of all the backroom deals, political horse- trading and compromises Lincoln and his allies had to make to put an end to slavery in America.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Lincoln is the work of a different director, one truly fascinated by why his subjects do what they do, one who invests each moment with the artistry he has often reserved for setpieces.
There are long stretches that are as quiet, contemplative, and austere as anything Spielberg has ever done.
Lincoln is a film about the arts of suasion-one that encompasses oratory and extortion, conciliation and conspiracy, arms twisted and cheeks turned. It is a film, in short, about politics.
Day-Lewis's Lincoln is the spiritual center of the film, but he's ringed by a multitudinous cast of characters.
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| Original Score: B
For a man so funny, so vital, so literally larger than life, "Lincoln" remains a Daguerreotype - careful, quiet and dully framed.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Lincoln serves history better than it does the multiplex, and that's a brave and worthy thing in a time of slippery truths and splintered attention spans.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Its characters, people who lived long ago and who tended to be much more loquacious than a 140-character burst would allow, somehow seem to breathe the same air we do.
"Lincoln" gratifyingly dodges the kind of safe, starchy hagiography that some Spielberg skeptics feared.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Yes, this is a movie about people talking in rooms. And the talk, at its best, fascinates.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Lincoln has been an oracle, and now, in Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," as portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, he is a man.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Lincoln" looks like a big historical drama on an epic scale, but it's also a tightly focused study of character, principle and politics.
The portrait of Lincoln transcends conventional judgments; it's a complete creation, perfect on its own terms.
Its title notwithstanding, Lincoln is an absorbing, intellectual look at the political machinations involved in abolishing slavery, not an exhaustive biopic about Honest Abe.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This Lincoln isn't an abstracted, infallible ideal, but rather a deeply conflicted, often lonely leader simply trying to do the right thing - even if that means a few wrong things along the way.
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| Original Score: 8/10
There is nothing bravura or overly emotional about Spielberg's direction here, but the impeccable filmmaking is no less impressive for being quiet and to the point.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It provides Daniel Day-Lewis with an opportunity for his latest extraordinary performance, one filled with kindness and strength in equal measure.
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| Original Score: 4/5
"Lincoln" does something that, at this very particular moment in time, seems almost impossible to comprehend. It makes politics exciting again.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a must-see for Daniel Day-Lewis' charismatic, subtly shaded performance as Lincoln - and an even richer one by Tommy Lee Jones ...
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| Original Score: 3/4
"Lincoln" is wrapped in the heavy cloak of the traditional biopic, with all the top-shelf acting, period detail and important speeches the genre requires.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Daniel Day-Lewis is extraordinary as the president, capturing his wit and generosity but also the iron will that made him the country's greatest hero.
The phenomenal Daniel Day-Lewis plays Lincoln with immersive, indelible power in Spielberg's brilliant, brawling epic.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Lincoln is brain food and, at another pivotal moment in American political history, an instructive feast.
To say that this is among the finest films ever made about American politics may be to congratulate it for clearing a fairly low bar.
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| Original Score: 5/5
It blends cinematic Americana with something grubbier and more interesting than Americana, and it does not look, act or behave like the usual perception of a Spielberg epic.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The hallmark of the man, performed so powerfully by Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln," is calm self-confidence, patience and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way.
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| Original Score: 4/4
One of the best American movies this year, and Spielberg's finest work in decades.
This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.
One of the finest historical dramas ever committed to film. It's a triumph for Spielberg, Kushner and, most of all, Day-Lewis.
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| Original Score: 4/4
In all, there's too much material, too little revelation and almost nothing of Spielberg's reliable cinematic flair.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This is a movie that's easier to admire than love; it's impressive but not exactly moving.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Lincoln is a stirring paradox, a dream of history as it might truly have happened.
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| Original Score: A
Defiantly intellectual, complex and true to the shifting winds of real-world governance, Lincoln is not the movie that this election season has earned-but one that a more perfect union can aspire to.
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| Original Score: 5/5
By the time the movie ends, you don't feel as if you know Lincoln-few, in his own time, claimed to know him. But you feel as if you know what it was like to be in his presence.
Though historians will surely find room to quibble, every choice Day-Lewis makes lends dignity and gravitas to America's most revered figure.
An absorbing, densely packed, sometimes funny telling of the 16th president's masterful effort in manipulating the passage of the 13th amendment.
