Bridge of Spies reviews: can Spielberg score Oscar record?

Steven Spielberg's Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies, which held its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on the weekend, is already being tipped for a best picture Oscar nomination.

The film is a dramatisation of a real-life Cold War spy-swap, with a script by British writer Matt Charman (polished by Joel and Ethan Cohen). It follows the efforts of US lawyer James B Donovan to secure the release of pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War in 1960.

It stars Tom Hanks as Donovan, and Mark Rylance as Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Critics have praised the film as a grown-up and surprisingly "feel-good" spy tale, slickly realised by some of Hollywood's safest hands.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian gives the film five stars and applauds Steven Spielberg's "terrific craftsmanship, pure storytelling gusto and that Midas-touch ability to find grounds for optimism everywhere". Spielberg, he says, has a gift for "uncynicism" and "uncovers decency and moral courage amidst all the Realpolitik".

For Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph, the film is a "handsome and mature" thriller, "rich with novelistic intrigue". It's also the great James Stewart Cold War drama that never was, says Collin – "a kind of Mr Smith Goes to West Berlin" with Tom Hanks as Stewart's stand in.

Yes, it's "a feel-good Cold War melodrama" says Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter, but one that is "smoothly handled by old pros who know what they're doing".

Hanks makes Donovan into another of the actor's Everyman characters, but his dry humour and intelligence "makes him very good company", and Rylance "brings fascination and very, very subtle comic touches".

Could this be the film that tips Spielberg's best picture nominations into double digits and makes him the most nominated director of all time, asks Kristopher Tapley in Variety. It's an understated film, he says, but it's "thematically potent" and features a leading performance that "commands the story as well as or better than any other this season".

Christopher Gray, writing for Slant, is one of a few critics who aren't convinced. Bridge of Spies is a good movie, he admits, but one that "suffers from a lack of anxiety about its convictions".

It has a streamlined efficiency, "but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe".

Bridge of Spies is released in the US on 16 October and UK on 27 November.