The 90th Academy Awards ceremony is about to start and this year nine films have been selected for the coveted Best Picture category. Among them is "Darkest Hour," a historical drama covering Winston Churchill’s first days as British prime minister, which took place at the same time as the Operation Dynamo evacuation.

Directed by Joe Wright, "Darkest Hour" is both the second Dunkirk-related film to be nominated at this year’s Oscars and also Wright’s second, following his 2007 adaptation of "Atonement," to be nominated for Best Picture. As with "Atonement," "Darkest Hour" takes the form of historical fiction, albeit with a more standard biographical bent.

This is the core of the praise from The Seattle Times’ Moira MacDonald who, like many, saw the film as a companion piece to "Dunkirk" but, unlike Christopher Nolan’s film, “‘Darkest Hour’ is a straightforward, day-by-day depiction of world-changing events, told with meticulous simplicity” and this works in its favor as it makes for “a handsome, old-fashioned film, filled with stirring music, dusty light and thoughtful performances.”

This leads to the bulk of the film’s praise, which is for Gary Oldman – an industry veteran who, after a career spanning over 30 years, has finally earned his first Best Actor nomination for starring as Churchill. While the film is a biopic, "Darkest Hour" perhaps hangs on the quality of the lead performance more so than others. Anthony Lane, writing for The New Yorker, opens his mini-review by wondering “How badly we need another Winston Churchill film is open to question” – a very fair point – but immediately pivots to saying it is “welcome, largely because of Gary Oldman in the leading role.”

Praise for his work has been unanimous. Lane continues, “He seems an unlikely choice, yet the lightness of his performance marks it out from other attempts; this Churchill, oddly quick on his feet, with a hasty huff and puff in his voice instead of a low, slow growl, suggests a man in a hurry to fight.” Peter Travers in Rolling Stone begins with a claim that “Oldman is one of the best actors on the planet” and follows it up by also stressing that his version of Churchill veers from the standard take as he is “on his feet and demanding attention like the brawling infant he resembles,” which provides the building blocks for a “lively, provocative historical drama.”

While The New York Observer's Rex Reed also saw a star turn from Oldman in "Darkest Hour," he didn’t see much of anything else in Joe Wright’s movie, referring to the central performance as being “a welcome distraction”: “Watching his gruff, ragged finesse as he orchestrates the behind-the-scenes strategy that led up to Dunkirk in this war picture without war almost makes you forget what a thumping bore everything is around him.”

A.O. Scott’s negative review in The New York Times takes this idea to its limits. Oldman is barely mentioned in the review, besides for a deliberately provocative line in which he is said to be “playing the part” of Churchill and that his work alone isn’t enough to prevent the film from “[falling] back on an idealized notion of the English character that feels, in present circumstances, less nostalgic than downright reactionary” and that the film, as a whole, is “a sop, an easy and complacent fantasy of Imperial gumption and national unity.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum is The AV Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, who says the “weak spot is the presumed selling point: the stunt casting of Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill” whose performance can be boiled down to “two hours of gesticulating with cigars.” However, he praises director Wright’s “baroque” style as being the thing that makes the film “watchable even in its plodding stretches.” He says “the film is busy […] packed with theatricality” and built on flourishes including “dramatic shafts of Rembrandt-by-way-of-’80s-music-video window light,” “tracking shots crossing the cutaway set of the underground Cabinet War Rooms bunker complex” and “the ‘on’ light of a radio microphone washing a room blood-red as Churchill reads a speech.”

According to betting odds comparison site Oddschecker, in the major awards, "Darkest Hour" is a rank outsider in every category besides Best Actor. It is averaging around 200/1 – the longest possible odds – for Best Picture and approaching 100/1 in everything. However, for Best Actor, Gary Oldman is the clear favorite at 1/14 and expected to round out the triple bill of Best Actor wins following his success at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.