Every Steven Spielberg Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

By Jack Pooley /

9. Lincoln (2012)

Disney

Though fundamentally academic and even a little stodgy, Lincoln sees Spielberg deliver one of his most restrained and least-intrusive directing gigs to date, giving Daniel Day-Lewis the stage to turn in an all-time masterpiece of a performance as the doomed American President.

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Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones provide especially remarkable support in a film that probably won't play well to younger audiences, but as a document that boasts a mind-boggling sense of time and place, it is a terrific achievement.

Far from the Oscar-baiting, sweeping epic it could so easily have been, Lincoln is instead an uncommonly intimate look at one of history's most statuesque figures.

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If the film ended a few minutes earlier in the hallway, we'd consider bumping it up a place.