It's an outstanding portrayal of Abraham Lincoln, but wouldn't have deserved the Best Picture Oscar

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2014)

Having Steven Spielberg, the mastermind behind many of the films with the highest budget and the biggest scale in the last 40 years, direct an entirely dialogue-centred portrayal of Abraham Lincoln doesn't seem like your first choice. However, it proved to be an excellent one, as Spielberg's vogue attracted some of the most talented people currently in the business to his project, both in the acting and general filmmaking cast, and thereby obtained twelve much deserved Academy Award nominations.
Two of this dozen actually resulted in wins of the golden statuette – one for the meticulously crafted production design and one for the unforgettable performance by the great Daniel Day-Lewis, losing his British accent and displaying what is the most mesmerising on-screen portrayal of a President of the United States I've ever seen. The all- star supporting cast is similarly outstanding, most of all Tommy Lee Jones's radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens, a wonderfully articulate character with a feel-good revelation near the film's ending. This articulacy comes from a script giving tremendous focus on an authentic recreation of the diction people, especially the politicians, had in this period and being the basis for all the sparkling, sophisticated, and incredibly fast-paced conversations in Lincoln that are quite a lot of fun to watch. On the downside, this nonstop gabble becomes extraordinarily exhausting over the film's two and a half hour running time and is likely to be, to some extent at least, the reason for me to not have been able to watch it in one go both times I've tried it.
I don't see that as a much of a flaw though, since many a good motion picture surpassing a length of 120 minutes is too long to watch without a break for me and Lincoln highly impressed me with an array of other features, such as its magnificent visual look or John Williams's beautiful score. The few real nuisances to be found in this epic would be the over the top attempt at depicting the 16th President of the United States as the charismatic old storyteller everyone pictures him as and the unnecessary tension created and the awful amount of time spent on the vote in the House of Representatives as every halfway educated person should be aware of its outcome.
Even so, Lincoln is an excellent biographical film, informative due to the information it brings up about the real-life figures working as supporting characters in the film and entertaining with an immensely talented acting ensemble and an enthralling way of storytelling, even though we're all familiar to the story.