'No one is loved as much as you by the people. Don't waste that power.'

Rating: 9/10 (29 March 2013)

LINCOLN is one of those films that defies anyone to say anything negative about it. It seems that Steven Spielberg joining hands with the national hero Abraham Lincoln and the racial equality issue is a sacred marriage and to offer dissident views of the film as a film approaches sacrilege.
The film is basically the last four months of Abraham Lincoln's life and the manner in which he struggled to end the war and pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery only to be assassinated at Ford's theater For this viewer the strongest aspect of the film is Tony Kushner's magnificent script, a script that places words befitting the times in the mouths of the men and women surrounding the final days of the war and the contentious governmental debate about slavery. It is pungent, poetic, inspiring, both raw and refined, and captures an era and a time in this country's history that will be difficult to match.
Yes, the cast is strong - massively collected from among some of the finest actors in film today. Everyone has crowned the head of Daniel Day-Lewis for his portrayal of Lincoln and Sally Fields as his borderline adjusted wife Mary and Tommy Lee Jones as the acerbic and convincingly committed Thaddeus Stevens, but the others in the cast deserve listing: David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook, Robert Latham, Bruce McGill, Tim Blake Nelson, Lee Pace, Boris McGiver, David Costabile, Stephen Spinella, Colman Domingo, David Oyelowo, Lukas Haas and on and on.
The battle scenes are as atrocious as war is atrocious and the lighting and camera work throughout the film capture that dark period in our history magnificently. Doubtless the film will always be regarded as perfect, but for some it is overly long, occasionally pretentious, at times trying - but always rescued by Tony Kushner's fine screenplay adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin's novel 'Team of Rivals'.
Grady Harp