Critics reviews

Weird. Because at a text level, this is exemplary. But I'm coming around to the idea that Spielberg isn't quite suited to it, his usual paternal obsessions and emotional crescendos shoehorned (chillily) into a narrative about compromising your beliefs and/or playing dirty for a perceived greater good.

Kushner's formalized but fascinating talk often leaves little in the way of overt emotion to guide some of the movie's very best moments; searching in vain for an emotional pinpoint, Spielberg offers moments that are surprisingly un-Spielbergian, that lend his Lincoln an impressive breadth of thought and zone of inward shadow.

[The scene where Lincoln and his wife talk about his dream] could be read as either an arbitrary acknowledgment of Lincoln's documented interest in psychic phenomena or a brief opportunity for Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to reprise their watery fishbowl motif from Minority Report, but it really serves the more interesting, ambitious purpose of establishing Lincoln as a comedy of the narcissism that binds prophecy with political policy.

The Academy is forever being lambasted for its wrong decisions, but I think they made the right choice here: this year's winner, Argo, is a much more fleet and skilfully-engineered movie than this long-winded civics lecture – and, though Argo takes liberties with History (its climax is entirely fabricated), Lincoln is guilty of a more heinous sin: it views the past from the sanctimonious pulpit of the present, and condemns it for being the past.

In large part, Lincoln manages [to create surprise and suspense around history's foregone conclusions] by dramatising the relationship between speech and thought, thought and deed. It is a movie of minds being made up, so dependent on oratorical manoeuvring that there often seems little for Spielberg to do by way of signature ‘cinematic' touches other than, with DP Janusz Kaminski, to pour shafts of backlighting sunbeams through windows into underlit rooms.

It's eminently watchable, but Lincoln's larger purpose and relevance for Now remains elusive. Released against the backdrop of a contentious election in which the former party of Lincoln (the Republicans) relied heavily on racist dog-whistle cues to rally the faithful, dialogue about white people having lost their moral compass suggests one reason.

There's so much palpable, productive tension between past and present in this film; between historicity and mythologization; usefulness and verisimilitude; intimacy of scale and staggering ambition; the ebullience of triumph and the specter of grief; aching beauty and the pervasive stench of death. It's a cinematic equivalent to the profound power of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address.

Anti-romanticism is all the more ideological because it pretends to have no ideology, to be the "plain truth" that demonstrates the falsity of romantic visions. And this movie is anti-romantic because, to be blunt, it is anti-revolutionary. In this movie, "things happen" through patience and compromise, not through steadfast idealistic struggle.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln is a work of sufficient richness to instantly invite repeat viewings. It is a history film that dares to pile on verbal and visual details thickly and rapidly enough that a second viewing may be necessary simply to register all that is going on.

The combination of Steven Spielberg and America's most beloved President might seem like a recipe for sentimentality. But the surprisingly spare, riveting Lincoln is after something more complex. At once a further mythologizing of Honest Abe and an absorbing demystification of 19th-century politics, it's one of the most mature films Spielberg has made.

Lincoln is overlong, and as it nears its inevitable end, with the commander in chief slain off camera, the director lets his film lurch before somewhat sputtering to a halt. But what the movie finally communicates is that which seems most fortunate about Lincoln's life: Though he died as a direct result of his tide-turning actions, the president seems to have been given just enough time in this world to change it.

As imagined by Spielberg and Kushner, Lincoln's Lincoln is the ultimate mensch. He is a skilled natural psychologist, an interpreter of dreams, and a man blessed with an extraordinarily clever and subtle legal mind. A master storyteller who speaks in parables and employs slyly self-deprecating humor, he is a small "d" democrat glad to converse with anyone, willing to shoulder the solitary burden of historical tragedy, and, although capable of righteous wrath, ruled by compassion for all.