(EW.com) -- As the title character of Steven Spielberg's solemnly transfixing "Lincoln," Daniel Day-Lewis is tall and elegantly stooped, with thatchy gray-black hair, sunken cheeks, and a grin that tugs at the corners of his mouth whenever he tries to win someone over by telling them a good story (which is often).
Day-Lewis looks so much like the photographs of Abraham Lincoln that you don't have to squint, even a bit, to buy that it's him. He nails Lincoln's thousand-yard stare — a gaze directed at once inward (at the whir of his own mental machinery) and outward (at the cosmic hum of history).