Kritiken

Full of meticulous period details, with dark rain-slicked streets, reliably beautiful in the silver, blue-gray tones of Janusz Kaminski's cinematography, the movie, like so many Spielberg period films, reverberates with a sense of present-day anxieties.

Retrofitting the cold war for the end of the Obama era, Bridge of Spies combines the negotiation of international agreements with a Trumpist approach: deals are best handled by private citizens who know better than government officials how to get what's best for the country. Today, of course, it is this businessman figure who wants to build a border wall, a bellicose reversal of this film's message.

Spielberg's filmmaking doesn't release tension via traditionally modern, inexpressively frenetic cutting. Every detail in every frame is hyper-tactile, exhilaratingly inescapable. Spielberg fetishizes 1950s-era America, particularly his beloved idea of the nuclear domestic unit, while understanding it to be a precious mirage that could be blinked away at any moment.

Spielberg's wholly untrendy dramatization of a true tale of Cold War heroism is pure Hollywood craft of the kind we no longer see, with an undercurrent of Capra-esque liberal humanism so genuine it could make today's cynical progressives blush with a mixture of horror and envy. Nothing from the once-upon-a-time dream factory in 2015 was as exquisitely controlled. One can only hope that some future filmmaker is taking note.

A cinematic masterstroke helmed by Hollywood's consummate dream weaver Steven Spielberg, with delicious ingredients from the Coen brothers, who rewrote the original screenplay. The result is a film at once earnest and ironic, sweet and sinister, conventional and iconic, patriotic and cosmopolitan — a dexterous exercise in genre-bending and auteur-mixing.

Mr. Spielberg's Cold War picture is a frequent nail-biter even if, like this old man, you know how the story turns out. It is very Spielbergy but without crossing that line many say Munich crossed.

Bridge of Spies is reasonably satisfying to sit through, and its geographical and generic shifts – from Brooklyn to Berlin, and from spy film to courtroom drama to noirish Cold War film, with a dash of war pilot escapade thrown in for good measure – keep it moving along when it could otherwise have become bogged down. But it is not a film that stays with us, that has the potential to haunt or unsettle us.

Bridge of Spies was another enjoyable hodgepodge of a film. In lesser hands it would have been a mess; as imagined by Spielberg it becomes a moving period film and testament to American values.

Bridge of Spies is a warm portrait of a friendship, an excitingly intricate story of realistically scaled suspense, and a visually ravishing and lovingly crafted rendering of mid-century America, where how you look matters much less than what you do.

Spielberg clichés are in evidence, from repeated phrases used for effect – "Would it help?" – to a heavenly choir intruding on the soundtrack more than once. The look is grandiose: white light pours out of windows in the daytime scenes, lamps throw a burnished-orange sheen in the night interiors. That said, the shots of drab, snow-shrouded post-war Berlin are magnificent – and in fact the film is often irresistible, bouncing along for 141 minutes.

Bridge of Spies is not one of Spielberg's most exciting or endearing films, but it's very well made and as classical in its traits as a film can be. It sits nicely beside his other historical dramas, Lincoln and the excellent Munich.

As so often when Spielberg is being serious, you get flavours of lush matinee immersiveness and you pay for them with your soul. Far more than the totally risible War Horse (2011), that misty-eyed man-animal-love epic sodden with overdramatisation... Bridge of Spies demonstrates Spielberg's fluency with place-setting and enveloping atmosphere, and how his overall storytelling sensibility subsequently reduces it all to a pandering bore.