The pace is brisk, the acting for the most part superb, the feel genuine, and the final act white-knuckle. Ben Affleck’s tale of the clandestine evacuation of 6 Americans hiding in Tehran after the storming of the American embassy is almost as incredible as the actor’s improbable rise as a director after a long plummet from the heights of A list actor.

What is true is that 6 Americans made it out of the U.S. embassy into the hands of Canadian embassy personnel and that a fake sci-fi movie was created as cover for their exit posing as the film crew. That’s about the sum total of what is accurate in this movie.  Affleck takes this nifty premise and constructs a gripping yarn around it, one that is lessened only a little by Affleck’s leaden acting as CIA operative Tony Mendez and a shopworn and unnecessary theme built around his family woes. Affleck’s handling of the storming of the embassy (which was very accurate) and the tense escape via the airport (a near complete concoction) is assured, and the creation of an Alan Arkin Hollywood producer for comic effect is savvy.

After Gone Baby Gone, The Town and this film, Affleck is a top 5 director. Imagine that.

In The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow exhibited an expert feel for the milieu of a bomb disposal team in early post-Saddam Iraq. While her depiction of the mechanics of the team was the subject of debate, the desolation and immediacy of her scenarios was spot on, evoking the overburdened and overwhelmed sensibility of better-equipped invading/liberating armies since the time of the Romans. What kept The Hurt Locker from being a great film was the simplistic protagonist, Jeremy Renner, a danger freak and little more, with whom we were required to spend too much time.

In Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow again utilizes a simplistic heroine, CIA officer Jessica Chastain, whose entire persona is a relentless “get bin Laden” zeal. Fortunately, the story Bigelow is telling is an intricate intelligence bureaucracy procedural and Chastain is progressively morphed from the driver of the story to an observer. To her credit, she remains disciplined and does not stray from the confines of her role. Chastain is emblematic of the effort and the desire to fight al Qaeda and eliminate its leader, and the film has refreshingly little interest in what makes her tick, her relationship with men, etc . . . the story is quite enough. This film is much like United 93, authentic, thoughtful, and gripping, even though we know the end.

Two other aspects make this picture extraordinary. First, it deals with politics in a subtle yet effective manner, opening with a clutter of 911 calls on 9-11, which creates the urgency necessary to begin the story, and acknowledging certain political realities (the failure of the CIA on WMD, the changing domestic political tenor on enhanced interrogation, and the Obama administration’s moves with regard to same) without gettng bogged down in their import or advocating for any particular position.

Second, of some controversy, Bigelow shows torture.  Torture assuredly occurred and was also assuredly of value in the war against al Qaeda. Just ask new National Security Advisor John Brennan: “There has been a lot of information that has come out from these interrogation procedures that the agency has in fact used against the real hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives.” The histrionic attacks on Bigelow’s film because it merely shows torture demonstrate the exact false and forced narrative that Zero Dark Thirty eschews. It is depressing that Bigelow had to actually say, “”Experts disagree sharply on the facts and particulars of the intelligence hunt, and doubtlessly that debate will continue. As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Usama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore.”

Bigelow’s statement is echoed by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: “Torture may be morally wrong, and it may not be the best way to obtain information from detainees, but it played a role in America’s messy, decade-long pursuit of Osama bin Laden, and Zero Dark Thirty is right to portray that fact.”

Juxtapose the statements of Bigelow and Bowden with the criticism of actor and activist David Clennon (“Torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances. ‘Zero’ never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal”) and you have the difference between Zero Dark Thirty and the spate of shit message movies that Hollywood churns out every year to show us the right path. The Clennons are terrified. By showing that torture may have gotten certain results, sweet Lord Almighty, we have endorsed torture, which we cannot hope to condemn unless we show it was a masochistic folly of absolutely no intelligence value.

Perhaps we can delete the great line where one interrogator tells Chastain to be careful because the domestic political winds are shifting and she doesn’t want to be “the last one holding a dog collar” and substitute it with, “you know, upon reflection, this stuff we’ve been doing . . . It’s just morally wrong and maybe even criminal.”

The previews for Lincoln filled me with ambivalence.  Stephen Spielberg is a gifted filmmaker, yet his penchant for the glib and over dramatic is well-established, and what was presented in the trailers seemed overly earnest and self-important.

The first scene of the film did not help.  President Lincoln surveys the troops.  Two white soldiers (including, inexplicably, the peculiar looking Lukas Haas from Witness) unconvincingly quote the Gettysburg Address to him while a black soldier ahistorically makes demands on the president, such as equal pay for equal work.  As the white soldiers fail in recitation, the black soldier delivers the full verse.  And courtesy of John Williams, stirring horns blare.

The exchange feels wholly unrealistic.  I was reminded of the great scene in Frost/Nixon where Sam Rockwell, playing the Nixon-hating James Reston, Jr., practices excoriating Tricky Dick upon their meeting, and then when his big moment comes:

Richard Nixon: [Reston swore to Zelnick earlier he would never shake Nixon’s hand] Pleasure to meet you. [Offers Reston his hand]

James Reston, Jr.: [after a pause, he shakily extends his own hand] Mr. President…

Bob Zelnick: [after Nixon leaves] Oh that was devastating, I don’t think he’s ever going to get over that.

James Reston, Jr.: Fuck off.

There’s none of that here.  The black soldier is as comfortable as if he were speaking to his city councilman in 1987.

But Christy Lemire of The Huffington Post gets it right: “For anyone who cringed just a little while watching the trailer for ‘Lincoln’ and worried that it might be a near-parody of a Steven Spielberg film, with its heartfelt proclamations, sentimental tones and inspiring John Williams score, fret not.”

After its inauspicious start, Lincoln settles into a proficient, if overlong, political potboiler having more in common with Advise and Consent than grand, gauzy history.  Lincoln needs to get the 13th Amendment passed in the House, but he is squeezed by moderate Republicans (led by Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair) who seek a negotiated peace with the South; radical Republicans (led by Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens)  who distrust Lincoln’s expedience; and fiery Democrats who look for every advantage to stymie the bill.  Lincoln works the room and the town trying to thread the needle of events and demonstrating not only his keen intellect and gift for homespun stories but a progressive mind that regularly churns.

As Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis is masterful.  The weight of his worry and the tragedies that have befallen him are etched in his face, yet his Lincoln is not merely an icon.  Day Lewis communicates Lincoln’s anger, his canny sense for politics, his exasperation at his unstable wife (Sally Field), and his physical nature, not only with his children but with others to whom he instinctively feels fatherly.  Field is also noteworthy, fleshing out Mary Lincoln and capturing her irrationality as well as her cunning.

There are some problems.  While the history feels right, and most of it is indeed accurate, some of it is not, and in ways that matter.  For the final vote on the amendment, free blacks pack the galleries and Mary Lincoln observes with her personal dressmaker, played by Gloria Reuben (who I have not seen since ER).  This did not happen and it feels cheezy, part of a clear effort by the filmmakers to give agency where none existed.

Sometimes this works, as when Lincoln has a White House porch discussion with Reuben about the fate of blacks after the war.  It is clearly a concoction but feels legitimate, especially when Lincoln says, “I don’t know you.”

Sometimes it doesn’t work, as in the opening scene.  But you can feel Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner trying mightily, mainly by use of the ennobled, stoic black.

They had to know Kate Masur’s New York Times op-ed about the film’s depiction of the the passivity of its black characters was coming (Masur suggests that perhaps the director could have shown Reuben and Lincoln’s black butler “leaving the White House to attend their own meetings”), but they did the film no favors in trying to head it off.

Tommy Lee Jones is also all wrong as Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens.  He’s either too Western, too Southern, or simply too rugged to play this man in this time.  When he brings home the actual version of the final bill to read to his housekeeper and lover in bed, it was hard to stifle a groan.  And the ending, where Appomattox, the assassination, and an inaugural speech flashback are quickly tacked on, is unwieldy.

Finally, it is time for Williams to hang it up.  The score is a lazy rip-off of his work on Saving Private Ryan.

Criticism aside, The New Yorker dubs the film a civics lesson for children, and indeed it is (I brought both of mine to the movie and we had a great discussion afterwards).  As one of my professors told me, history is in many ways the stories we tell about ourselves, and this is a story about ourselves told fairly well.