Box office Lincoln grossed $182.2 million in North America and $93.9 overseas for a total of $275.3 million, against its $65 million budget. The film had a limited opening in eleven theaters with $944,308 and an average of $85,846 per theater. It opened at #15, becoming the highest opening of a film with such a limited release. It opened in 1,175 theaters with $21 million and an average of $11,859 per theater.
Critical response On the review aggregation website
Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 89% based on 288 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Daniel Day-Lewis characteristically delivers in this witty, dignified portrait that immerses the audience in its world and entertains even as it informs." On
Metacritic the film has weighted average score of 87 out of 100 based on 45 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four out of four stars, and said: "The hallmark of the man, performed so powerfully by Daniel Day-Lewis in
Lincoln, is calm self-confidence, patience and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way." Glenn Kenny of
MSN Movies gave it five out of five stars, stating: "It's the most remarkable movie Steven Spielberg has made in quite a spell, and one of the things that makes it remarkable is how it fulfills those expectations by simultaneously ignoring and transcending them." Colin Covert of the
Star Tribune wrote: "
Lincoln is one of those rare projects where a great director, a great actor and a great writer amplify one another's gifts. The team of Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner has brought forth a triumphant piece of historical journalism, a profound work of popular art and a rich examination of one of our darkest epochs." Charlie McCollum of the
San Jose Mercury News called the film "one of the finest historical dramas ever committed to film." Despite mostly positive reviews,
Rex Reed of
The New York Observer wrote: "In all, there's too much material, too little revelation and almost nothing of Spielberg's reliable cinematic flair." However, reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Day-Lewis's performance.
A. O. Scott from
The New York Times wrote that the film "is finally a movie about how difficult and costly it has been for the United States to recognize the full and equal humanity of black people" and concluded that the movie was "a rough and noble democratic masterpiece". He also said that Lincoln's concern about his wife's emotional instability and "the strains of a wartime presidency ... produce a portrait that is intimate but also decorous, drawn with extraordinary sensitivity and insight and focused, above all, on Lincoln's character as a politician. This is, in other words, less a biopic than a political thriller, a civics lesson that is energetically staged and alive with moral energy." In July 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of
The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 222. That same month, it ranked number 85 on
Rolling Stones list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."
Historian response Eric Foner (
Columbia University), a
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the period, claimed in a letter to
The New York Times that "The film grossly exaggerates the possibility that by January 1865 the war might have ended with slavery still intact." He also noted, "The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the
Women's National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist women headed by
Susan B. Anthony and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton."
Kate Masur (
Northwestern University) accused the film of oversimplifying the role of blacks in
abolition and dismissed the effort as "an opportunity squandered" in an
op-ed for
The New York Times.
Harold Holzer, the co-chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and author of more than 40 books, served as a consultant to the film and praised it, but also observed that there is "no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie" in a piece for
The Daily Beast. Holzer states, "As for the Spielberg movie's opening scene ... it is almost inconceivable that any uniformed soldier of the day (or civilians, for that matter) would have memorized a speech that, however ingrained in modern memory, did not achieve any semblance of a national reputation until the 20th century." Barry Bradford, a member of the
Organization of American Historians, offered an analysis of some of the finer historical points of the film's representation of clothing, relationships and appearance.
Allen Guelzo (
Gettysburg College), also writing for
The Daily Beast, had some plot criticism, but disagreed with Holzer: "The pains that have been taken in the name of historical authenticity in this movie are worth hailing just on their own terms". In a later interview with the
World Socialist Web Site, Guelzo claimed that "the film was 90 percent on the mark, which given the way Hollywood usually does history is saying something" and that it "got with reasonable accuracy a lot of Lincoln's character, the characters of the main protagonists, and the overall debate over the 13th Amendment. The acting and screenwriting were especially well done... I had never thought that Daniel Day-Lewis was acting, because what he portrayed seemed so close to my own mental image of what Lincoln must have been like." A historian has suggested that the depiction of Lincoln's high pitched voice, somewhat awkward mannerisms and even how he walked was remarkably accurate. David Stewart, an independent historical author, writing for History News Network, described Spielberg's work as "reasonably solid history", and told readers of HNN to "go see it with a clear conscience". Lincoln biographer Ronald White also admired the film, though he noted a few mistakes and pointed out in an interview with
NPR, "Is every word true? No." Historian
Joshua M. Zeitz, writing in
The Atlantic, noted some minor mistakes, but concluded that "
Lincoln is not a perfect film, but it is an important film". Following a screening during the film's opening weekend, the
Minnesota Civil War Commemoration Task Force held a panel discussion in which Dr. David Woodard of
Concordia University remarked: "I always look at these films to see if a regular person who wasn't a 'Lincoln nut' would want to read a book about it after they watched the movie. I get the impression that most people who are not history buffs will now want to read something about Lincoln." Regarding the historical source material for Kushner's screenplay, legal historian Michael Vorenberg, a professor at
Brown University and author of
Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, noted several details throughout the film that "could only have come from [his] book." Among these details were specifics of dealings between Democrats and Thaddeus Stevens, the story behind securing Alexander Coffroth's vote and the fact that African Americans were present in the congressional galleries during the final vote. Regarding the portrayal of Lincoln's final moments, editor Rhoda Sneller of Abraham Lincoln Online, references a diary entry from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. The entry conflicts with the final scenes in the film in which the dying Lincoln is seen dressed in a nightgown, hunched over in his bed. Welles wrote "The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed," and "he had been stripped of his clothes." The differences between the first hand account and the present Lincoln serve to paint a more concise and dignified image of the president's death. == Accolades ==