15 Best Movies Based On True Stories

Films based on, adapted from, or loosely inspired by real-life events have been commonplace since the beginning of cinema, and they remain a highly popular proposition to this day. This makes perfect sense, because not only does ripping from historical record allow filmmakers to bypass the old Twain-ian dictum about truth being fundamentally stranger than fiction, but there's just an extra oomph of fascination to watching events unfold in a movie while knowing they bear at least some small measure of resemblance to things that actually happened.

The number of great films based on true stories is, frankly, too great to even count. You could honestly make a sizable list of the best such movies for every year since 1925, but here, we've tried to come up with a roster of exemplary masterpieces that showcase the very best of what fact-based cinema can be. Heavy fictionalization, historical liberties, and artistic license may apply, naturally, but there is some form of deep, abiding truth to every one of these films.

These are the best movies based on true stories.

On August 22, 1972, two men named John Wojwicz and Salvatore "Sal" Naturile initiated an attempt to rob a bank in Brooklyn, New York – an attempt that went awry when the bank turned out to have little cash in store, prompting the robbers to hold the bank employees hostage at gunpoint. The ensuing hostage situation was ultimately drawn out for 14 hours and made New York City history, inspiring a Life magazine article by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore. Three years later, a film based on the article was made, with a screenplay by Frank Pierson and direction by Sidney Lumet.

Starring Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik (a lightly fictionalized version of Wojwicz) and John Cazale as Naturile, 1975's "Dog Day Afternoon" is one of the crown jewels of New Hollywood, a film buzzing with sweaty, messy, achingly human energy. Fusing tragedy, tension, and humor, it manages to honor all the complicated details of the incredible true story that inspired it, from Sonny's surprising motives to his christening as an impromptu folk hero to the bank employee's jittery navigation of the situation. Few '70s movies raise such hell.

On June 27, 1905, while the spirit of popular revolution was brewing all around Russia, the crew of the Potemkin, a battleship in the Imperial Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet anchored off the coast of Ukraine, engaged in a world-changing act of rebellion. Fed up with the battleship's intolerable work conditions, many crewmates refused to eat borscht made from maggot-infested meat, and were sentenced to death for insubordination, which prompted a mutiny. After successfully taking over the ship, the mutineers headed to the nearby town of Odessa, where they joined the populace in demonstrations against the Tsarist government.

Those successive incidents became the basis for Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film "Battleship Potemkin" — one of the greatest achievements in the history of the film medium, and a touchstone in the development of cinematic montage. Over the course of just 74 minutes, Eisenstein, the greatest of all Soviet silent filmmakers, condenses history, action, tragedy, popular animus, and pointed political rage into a breathtaking feat of agitprop. Many Soviet propaganda films are essential viewing for film history fans, but "Potemkin," in its unassailable enormity, is just something else entirely.

In the late 1980s, Iranian film buff Hossain Sabzian made the decision to impersonate celebrated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and he managed to con middle-class couple Mahrokh and Abolfazl Ahankhah and their two sons into believing that he wanted to feature them as stars in his next film and use their house as a filming location. After making several visits to the Ahankhahs' home, Sabzian was found out and arrested. Upon coming across a magazine article by journalist Hassan Farazmand detailing the story, Abbas Kiarosami endeavored to make Sabzian the subject of his next film.

The film in question, 1990's "Close-Up," became a landmark of Iranian cinema and completely transformed the way directors and audiences the world over thought about film, narrative, and historicity. Melding fiction and documentary, leading Sabzian and the Ahankhahs in revelatory re-enactments of their own fraught story while simultaneously recording Sabzian's trial in real time, Kiarostami reinvented the medium itself by repositioning and re-centering the human element. Its release marked a turning point for documentaries, as well as for fact-based films in general; once "Close-Up" existed in the world, there was no going back.

Between the early 1940s and the 1960s, Italian-American New York City native Giacobbe "Jake" LaMotta rose rapidly through the ranks of professional middleweight boxing, drawing attention for the aggressive, relentlessly stalking style that earned him the nickname "Raging Bull." Although he eventually reached the post of world middleweight champion and held it for two years between 1949 and 1950, LaMotta's tempestuous and acrimonious personal life soon ushered him into a dramatic downward spiral, leading to a premature retirement and a messy reinvention as a C-list actor and comedian. In 1970, he told it all in a memoir, and it became the basis for one of Martin Scorsese's greatest films.

Driven, vicious, and incisive like almost no other life-spanning biopic in film history, with Thelma Schoonmaker's Oscar-winning editing and other clever filmmaking techniques finding a hallucinatory rhythm in LaMotta's rise and fall, "Raging Bull" is both a great sports film and a one-of-a-kind psychological probe into a man equal parts repellent and fascinating. That De Niro won his only Best Actor Oscar for it should come as no surprise to anyone who's seen how fearlessly he throws himself into the ring.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had one of the most extraordinary and meteoric careers in the history of all the arts. In just over two decades, at the tail end of the 18th century, he permanently changed the face of classical music, and from 1781 until his death in 1791, he was the king of the Viennese musical scene. In that time, his career brushed up against that of Antonio Salieri, an Italian composer six years his senior, who lorded over Italian-language opera in Vienna and is widely believed to have been involved in a dogged professional rivalry with Mozart.

In 1979, that rivalry became the basis for a play by Peter Shaffer, and in 1984, that play was adapted into one of the most intense and exacting music-based films of all time. While completely inaccurate on a historical level, Miloš Forman's "Amadeus" captures something ineffable and timeless about the spirit of both Mozart and Salieri as artists: It's the rare musical biopic that truly understands its subjects' music as an aesthetically commanding lifeforce. To this day, very few Best Picture Oscar winners equal it or top it.

During World War I, British Army lieutenant T. E. Lawrence was assigned to the Hejaz as a representative of the British government in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and served as a liaison to Prince Faisal, who spearheaded the revolt. Although tasked with upholding and advancing British interests in the Middle Eastern Front, Lawrence wound up developing an intense personal connection with the Arabs and their struggle for independence. He later told the story of his involvement in the Arab Revolt in the autobiography "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," published in full shortly after his death in 1935.

Lawrenece's autobiography was then liberally adapted into David Lean's most celebrated film and arguably film history's greatest epic: "Lawrence of Arabia." Beyond those lofty descriptors, it's a film that still astonishes six decades later for its willingness to get its hands dirty: Honoring all the hubris, political contradiction, psychosexual mania, and vulnerability of T. E. Lawrence (Peter O'Toole, who nearly turned down his role) about as overtly as it could get away with in 1962, Lean's film imagines cinema's vastest landscapes as a theater for the strange meanders of the soul.

Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925, and he had his childhood and adolescence repeatedly upended by racist violence and harassment. As a young adult, he became involved in criminal activity and was arrested in 1946; while in prison, he came into contact with the Nation of Islam, and, following his parole in 1952, he took up ministry. From there on out, Malcolm X became one of the most iconic and influential figures of the American Civil Rights Movement, known for his unapologetic radicalism and enormous power as a public speaker, with a life that in many ways paralleled and reflected the history of mid-20th-century Black American struggle.

While many other great filmmakers have struggled with the cradle-to-grave biopic template, Spike Lee took a 1971 James Baldwin and Arnold Perl-penned screenplay based on Malcolm X's 1965 autobiography and turned it into the greatest American film of 1992, and one of the greatest of all time. Through cinematically expansive, epistemologically thorough, relentlessly purposeful mise-en-scène and editing, coupled with an all-timer Denzel Washington performance, "Malcolm X" is mid-20th-century history made raw and vital.

In 1955, 11-year-old New Yorker Henry Hill was determined to find a part-time job, and fascinated by the mafia presence in his Italian-American neighborhood. He began running errands for local caporegime Paul Vario, and, at 13, he met Vario's trusted associate James Burke a.k.a. Jimmy the Gent, who took him under his wing along with Thomas DeSimone. Over the following years, Hill, mentored by Burke, plunged deeper into the life of a prolific gangster; decades later, Hill was arrested, and testified against his former associates in exchange for witness protection.

The 1985 non-fiction book "Wiseguy" by Nicholas Pileggi recounted Hill's story, and, in 1990, Martin Scorsese used Pileggi's book as the basis for his — and, some would say, the film medium's — defining gangster film. Starring Ray Liotta as Hill, Lorraine Bracco as his wife Karen Hill, Robert De Niro as Burke analog James Conway, and an Oscar-winning Joe Pesci as DeSimone analog Tommy DeVito, "Goodfellas" is a relentless 146-minute descent into the dizzying allure and the brutal after-game of mob life, clear-eyed and unglamorous to a degree no other film in the genre has ever been. 

If you want to see more movies like "Goodfellas" we've got you covered.

Between 1943 and 1954, there existed a highly successful women's baseball league in the United States known as the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League,  the first professional league of its kind in American recorded history. Founded during World War II to maintain public interest in baseball while vast swaths of the male major league players were taking part in the war effort, the AAGPBL inaugurated a new era for women's sport in the U.S. and rose to unexpected levels of success and popularity even after the war. The team that dominated the AAGPBL was the Rockford Peaches, which won four total championships in 1945, 1948, 1949, and 1950.

The story of the AAGPBL, and of the Rockford Peaches more specifically, served as the basis for the ultimate sports movie: Penny Marshall's iconic, brilliant, and altogether irresistible "A League of Their Own." Keeping the general historical outline but fictionalizing the specific characters and events, the 1992 movie brings together Geena Davis, Madonna, Lori Petty, Rosie O'Donnell, Tom Hanks, and many more into an effervescent ensemble paean to the beauty of baseball and female camaraderie alike.

In 2003, Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg cross-referenced the directories of students' pictures known as "face books" to create a "Hot or Not"-style website where visitors could vote on the best-looking Harvard students to create a ranking. The website overwhelmed Harvard's networking hardware and nearly got Zuckerberg expelled. Months later, Zuckerberg and his then-roommates and partners, including Eduardo Saverin, launched an internal Harvard social networking site called "TheFacebook," which quickly exploded in popularity and was expanded to include students of other universities. As Facebook subsequently grew into a global social media behemoth, Zuckerberg was sued by fellow students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, who accused him of stealing their original idea for a Harvard social network.

All this petty tech bro intrigue was improbably adapted into the greatest cinematic power saga of our time in "The Social Network." The David Fincher-directed, Aaron Sorkin-scripted 2010 film understood the significance and fearsomeness of the Facebook-dominated zeitgeist years ahead of the world at large, while serving up the savviest, most gripping, most intense Hollywood character drama in years if not decades. It's mandatory 21st-century viewing that's basically a villain origin story.

In the early 1960s, with the Chinese Nationalist government having lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists and retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949, the future of both Taiwan and its citizens was up in the air, caught between the trauma of war, the beckoning call of capitalist economic growth, and the looming violence and repression of military rule. It was in that context that, on June 15, 1961, a teenage girl was murdered by one of her classmates in Taipei,  an event that had a profound impact on one Yang Dechang, a.k.a. Edward Yang, who was 13 at the time.

Decades later, Yang would turn to that shocking murder — aptly referred to in the original Chinese title "Youth Homicide Incident On Guling Street" — as the basis for the most sweeping and ambitious of his masterpieces. A cornerstone of late-20th-century arthouse cinema, "A Brighter Summer Day" finds Shakespearean tragedy and Tolstoyan irony alike in the pointless wars of two rival Taipei youth gangs, unspooling every little detail of their sweaty, messy, violence-strewn saga over the course of four astonishing hours.

In October 1939, about a month after the beginning of World War II, German industrialist and Nazi Party member Oskar Schindler moved to German-occupied Kraków, Poland, where he would soon acquire an enamelware factory. With the help of Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, Schindler began to employ as many Jewish people as possible in the factory in order to protect them from being arrested or killed by the SS. For the next five years, he made it his primary focus to save the lives of as many Jews as possible through his industrial operations.

Many films about Oskar Schindler and the 1200 "Schindlerjuden" he saved were proposed over the decades, but it wasn't until 1993 that their story actually got a mainstream cinematic treatment, and it pretty much immediately became the defining American film about the Holocaust. Adapted from Thomas Kenneally's 1982 historical fiction novel "Schindler's Ark" and directed by Steven Spielberg in what was then seen as a shocking departure from his usual blockbuster fare, "Schindler's List" redefined remembrance through cinema for modern-day Hollywood. The history of cinema can't be told without it.

In 1430, during the siege of Compiègne at the height of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, who eventually sold her to the English in exchange for 10000 francs. Later, between January 9 and May 29, 1431, Joan of Arc was tried for heresy in an ecclesiastical court in Rouen, France by a group of clergymen allied with the English. They questioned her on her leadership of French freedom fighters and her belief that she was acting under divine ordinance, and she was ultimately found guilty and burned at the stake.

Court notaries' transcripts of the trial still survive, and, in 1928, eight years after Joan of Arc's canonization as a saint by the Catholic Church, idiosyncratic Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer turned those records — condensed into a single day for dramatic convenience — into his film "The Passion of Joan of Arc." A relentless avant-garde whirlwind of faces and unguarded emotion featuring film history's greatest performance in Renée Jeanne Falconetti's Joan, it's the absolute pinnacle of cinema's silent era, still potent as ever nearly a full century later.

In 1984, coal workers across the United Kingdom were united in a notorious strike to prevent the closure of numerous pits by the Margaret Thatcher-led conservative government. A few months into the strike, they received the unexpected support of a group of London-based lesbians and gay men who founded a fundraising alliance known as "Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners." Although there was initial tension between the queer activists and the workers in small-town mining communities, class solidarity was eventually found. LGSM went on to raise tens of thousands of dollars in support of the miners' strike, while numerous leading figures in the strike also became pro-LGBT activists themselves.

That watershed moment of once-thought-improbable allyship was dramatized in the 2014 Matthew Warchus film "Pride," in which LGSM's visits and acclimation to the tiny mining village of Onllwyn, Wales paint a tough and realistic — yet deeply life-affirming — portrait of fears and prejudices melting into friendship, and fearless political action yielding important results. Big-hearted and unapologetically queer, it's the best kind of feel-good movie, the kind where the warmth and fuzziness are hard-earned and truly mean something.

Between 1560 and 1561, Basque Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre joined Don Pedro de Ursúa's expedition down the Amazon River in search of the mythical golden kingdom of El Dorado. Some time into the expedition, Aguirre joined forces with fellow officer Fernando de Guzmán and led a successful mutiny against Ursúa; later, he rioted against Guzmán himself, and, with both men dead, proclaimed himself the new leader of the expedition and Prince of Peru, openly rebelling against Spain. His campaign of conquest through Spanish America was short-lived, and he was eventually captured by royalists and shot dead in present-day Venezuela.

Werner Herzog was inspired by Lope de Aguirre's life to make the feverish 1972 historical epic "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," which tells a fictionalized story with the bare bones of the disastrous 1561 expedition as a starting point. Gorgeous, chaotic, darkly comical, and arduously shot on location, the film is the purest expression of Herzog's unique sensibility as a filmmaker — a feat of cinema so audacious and unbound that it defies belief even as you're watching it.