The 2012 Spielberg film starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln is Lincoln.
The film focuses on the final four months of Lincoln’s life, especially his effort to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. Tony Kushner’s screenplay was loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was produced and directed by Spielberg and features Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, and David Strathairn as Secretary of State William Seward. The film is primarily a political drama rather than a conventional cradle-to-grave biography.
A common mix-up is 13th, which is a 2016 documentary about mass incarceration and the legacy of slavery, not Spielberg’s Lincoln film. Selma is a 2014 film about Martin Luther King Jr., while Amistad is Spielberg’s 1997 historical drama about a revolt aboard a slave ship. Day-Lewis won his third Academy Award for playing Lincoln.