The best movies based on true stories: 13 films drawn from real events

Journalism and investigation

Some of the strongest true-story films are about people digging for the truth.

• All the President's Men (1976): Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigating Watergate for The Washington Post, from their 1974 book. Jason Robards won an Oscar as editor Ben Bradlee.
• Zodiac (2007): David Fincher's film follows the hunt for the Zodiac Killer, who taunted San Francisco with letters and ciphers. Fincher and his writer spent 18 months researching the case, which remains unsolved.
• Spotlight (2015): Tom McCarthy dramatises The Boston Globe team whose investigation of child abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston earned a Pulitzer Prize. It won Best Picture.

Crime and its cost

These films look at real criminals and the damage they did.

• Raging Bull (1980): Martin Scorsese adapts boxer Jake LaMotta's memoir, with Robert De Niro as a champion consumed by rage and jealousy.
• Goodfellas (1990): Based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, Scorsese charts mob associate Henry Hill's rise and fall from 1955 to 1980. Much of its energy came from improvisation in rehearsals.
• Catch Me If You Can (2002): Steven Spielberg's caper follows Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and his claimed cons as a pilot, doctor and lawyer. The truth of Abagnale's story has since been heavily disputed, which adds another layer.
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2023): Scorsese's epic covers the murders of Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma after oil was found on their land, with Lily Gladstone, DiCaprio and De Niro.

History and survival

These films dramatise moments that shaped the twentieth century.

• Schindler's List (1993): Spielberg's film follows Oskar Schindler, who saved more than a thousand Jewish refugees by employing them in his factories. Survivor Poldek Pfefferberg made telling Schindler's story his life's mission.
• Apollo 13 (1995): Ron Howard recreates the aborted 1970 Moon mission, adapted from astronaut Jim Lovell's book. It shows NASA improvising to bring three astronauts home.
• 12 Years a Slave (2013): Steve McQueen adapts Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir about being kidnapped from Washington, D.C., in 1841 and enslaved in Louisiana for 12 years. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Northup.
• Hidden Figures (2016): Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe play Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, NASA mathematicians during the Space Race.
• Oppenheimer (2023): Christopher Nolan's film, based on the biography American Prometheus, follows J. Robert Oppenheimer from Los Alamos to his 1954 security hearing, with Cillian Murphy in the lead.

Tech and ambition

One modern story shows how recent the true-story genre can get.

• The Social Network (2010): Fincher and Aaron Sorkin dramatise the founding of Facebook from Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires. Neither Mark Zuckerberg nor Facebook was involved, so treat it as a dramatisation.

How we chose the best movies based on true stories

Each film is adapted from a book, memoir or body of reporting about real events, and each has a strong critical or awards record. We aimed for a range of subjects, from journalism to crime to science, and noted where a film's accuracy is disputed. The list is chronological within the overall selection rather than a ranking.

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