Daniel Day-Lewis likes big, showy roles – Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood, Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York – and Lincoln offers him that, but with a personality that dominates via a dynamic, understated charm.

This solidly-built workhorse of a film tells of an unusual, and short-lived, revolution in the country of Denmark and of the love affair that jeopardized it. Imagine the storyline of Camelot, only with the king an idiot man-child and the queen turned on by men who read the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and you’ve got the idea.