The 20 best movies based on true stories

Wait, you’re telling us Watergate is an actual thing that happened, and in 1974 two reporters really did take down a sitting US president? Who knew? Jokes aside, even with its unspoilable ending, Alan Pakula’s journalism procedural stays riveting, and might be even more important today, with certain other recent leaders of the free world attempting to label the press ‘the enemy of the people’. Shot and acted with typical ‘70s naturalism, the film rejects any impulse to flesh out the home lives of Woodward and Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), or imagine what was happening inside the White House, or otherwise deviate from or embellish the central investigation. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman put trust in the idea that watching professionals do their work with the highest possible stakes is thrilling enough. They were right.

Before true crime podcasts and Dateline NBC marathons, there was Truman Capote, whose account of the 1959 massacre of a family in rural Kansas shocked a nation not yet desensitised to random acts of unspeakable violence. As groundbreaking as the book In Cold Blood was for long-form narrative journalism, director Richard Brooks matches it on screen, detailing the murders and their aftermath with a stark realism uncommon in Hollywood at the time. Conrad Hall’s black-and-white cinematography washes out any trace of cinematic artifice, and Robert Blake and Scott Wilson give intense, frighteningly believable performances. 

A rare depiction of a recession that’s neither a teary drama about farmers losing their homes nor a political screed against greedy one-percenters, Hustlers is instead a hyperkinetic story of economic survival, set in a world hit particularly hard by the 2008 financial crisis: New York strip clubs. Writer-director Lorene Scafaria based the script on a New York magazine article about a group of dancers who took to drugging their suddenly frugal Wall Street clientele and running up their credit cards, and she lenses the movie with a visual energy somewhere between Scorsese and a ‘90s rap video. Most of the accolades, though, went to Jennifer Lopez as the crew’s ringleader, who’s as charismatic on the pole as she is guarded off it. 

Ben Affleck had already flashed his directorial talent with Gone Baby Gone and The Town, but Argo still surprised a lot of people. It’s the kind of story no one would buy if it hadn’t happened: at the onset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, a movie-loving CIA agent hatched a plot to smuggle six diplomats out of the country by pretending to shoot a fake sci-fi flick there. Affleck, who also stars, expertly balances the high stakes with the absurdity of the situation, coming away with one of the most broadly appealing thrillers of the decade. It won the Oscar for Best Picture but Affleck himself got shut out – a truly egregious snub.   

It’s almost quaint to think about a time when the most controversial thing about Facebook was where Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea from. Still, David Fincher’s darkly sleek tech-bro drama remains a must-watch precisely because its ominous undertones – given extra-hefty shading from Trent Reznor’s revelatory, Oscar-winning score – seem to foreshadow the terrifying influence social media would wield on world history in the coming years.

A movie about a gay man holding up a bank in order to finance his partner’s gender reassignment surgery would probably end up banned in at least three states today, so imagine how it came across to ‘70s audiences. But the incident actually happened: in August 1972, two inexperienced crooks walked into a Chase Manhattan branch in Brooklyn with guns drawn; several hours and many rookie errors later, one of them would be dead, the other in custody. Sidney Lumet interpreted the episode as a countercultural tragicomedy, and with a loose, fiery performance from Al Pacino at its center, turned it into one of the era’s signature films.

The McConaissance hit its peak with this decidedly unsentimental biopic of Ron Woodruff, a homophobic redneck who nonetheless helped hundreds of early AIDS patients by exploiting loopholes in federal law and selling black-market HIV meds that the FDA was in no rush to approve. Matthew McConaughey let his famous beach bod atrophy to play Woodruff, who himself died of the disease, but it wasn’t some award-baiting stunt: the dissonance between Woodruff’s weakened frame and his intense narcissism is crucial to understanding the kind of guy he was. It won McConaughey an Oscar anyway, and he damn well deserved it.

Only an actor as intrinsically lovable as Melissa McCarthy could play someone as sour as writer Lee Israel; otherwise, the prospect of spending two hours with her might be too unpleasant to bear. By the early ‘90s, the celebrity biographer had burned enough bridges that she struggled to get anything published, and turned to literary forgery to pay her bills. Somehow, McCarthy renders Israel not only sympathetic but nearly lovable herself, without smoothing her essential prickliness. Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty’s screenplay is equally sympathetic, arguing that Israel’s successful if short-lived con was only possible because, deep down, the world appreciates a good liar. It’s a point proven by the fact that her memoir, on which the film is based, ended up being her most successful book.

In 1992, Christopher McCandless, a rich college kid from Virginia, abandoned his inherited wealth and guaranteed future to journey into the Alaskan wilderness on a vague search for ‘enlightenment’. He was later found dead inside an abandoned bus. But Jon Krakauer, the author who used McCandless’s journal to piece together the nonfiction classic Into the Wild, didn’t see his story as a tragedy exactly, and neither did Sean Penn. In adapting Krakauer’s book, Penn is a bit too uncritical of McCandless’s motivations, but that doesn’t make the film any less beguiling, nor does it take away from Emile Hirsch’s soulful, transfixing lead performance.

At one point in time, takedowns of Big Tobacco were practically their own film genre. (See: Thank You For Smoking, Merchants of Doubt.) Michael Mann’s prestige drama about the man who initially blew the whistle on what cigarette companies knew about the danger of their products is the best of the lot. It boasts an all-star cast including Al Pacino, Russell Crowe, and Christopher Plummer and a tight, tense script based on Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair article, ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’. A true-life masterpiece.

For how often the profession is shown on screen, movies rarely get journalism right – and when they do, it’s usually dull as a filmgoing experience. Spotlight is perhaps second to All the President’s Men in presenting high-level newspaper reporting in a way that’s both honest and compelling to watch. Featuring a remarkable ensemble cast led by Mark Ruffalo, Tom McCarthy’s Oscar-winner depicts the Boston Globe’s investigative team as they go up against an institution even more diabolical than Nixon’s White House: the Catholic church. 

It was only a matter of time before a viral Twitter thread became the basis for a motion picture. To be fair, anyone who read through the entirety of stripper Aziah King’s 2015 tweetstorm about her ill-fated trip to Florida probably had to come away knowing it’d be a movie one day. (Although technically, Zola is based on the Rolling Stone article that investigated her story.) After James Franco thankfully dropped out of the project, newcomer Janicza Bravo stepped in, spinning a darkly comedic yarn of sex, drugs, pimps and guns that shares DNA with Spring Breakers, The Bling Ring and other lurid tales of amoral youth.

Director Steve McQueen broke through with this harrowing depiction of an ultimately fatal six-week hunger strike perpetrated by IRA member Bobby Sands at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. Haunted by childhood memories of news stories about Sands, McQueen immersed himself in literature about the the five-year 'no wash protest' at the prison, and the end result is a remarkably detailed vision of life in a nearly literal hell. Michael Fassbender emaciated himself to play Sands, a necessary physical transformation that transcends a Method stunt and makes an already vivid performance even harder to shake. 

Baseball movies were already a tough sell in 2011, let alone baseball movies that are less about the players on the field than the front-office jostling that put them there. But in dramatising the unconventional thinking that elevated the hard-luck Oakland A’s to playoff contention in the early 2000s, Moneyball – based on the book by Michael Lewis, also of The Big Short fame – becomes a sort of meta-commentary on the stubborn conservatism that’s made America’s pastime increasingly anachronistic. Besides, watching Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman toss around Aaron Sorkin’s heady dialogue is athletic enough.

Ironically, given their M.O., the search for the Zodiac Killer over the years has become simply a puzzle for obsessed amateur internet sleuths to solve. But that has hardly diluted the ability of David Fincher’s magnum opus to unnerve – the broad-daylight murder of a picnicking couple remains perhaps the scariest horror movie moment of the last two decades.

A movie about the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden could have easily turned into flag-waving propaganda. But while some accused Zero Dark Thirty of defending military torture techniques, Kathryn Bigelow approaches the subject rather matter-of-factly – with the exception of Jessica Chastain’s CIA officer, a fictional composite – turning in a wartime thriller not all that different in tone from The Hurt Locker.  

Filmmakers had been trying to adapt Hunter S Thompson’s gonzo roman a clef for decades before Terry Gilliam finally brought it to the screen, and the end result shows why directors including Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone ultimately abandoned their attempts – a plotless drug-trip ruminating on the death of the ‘60s plays a lot better on the page. Still, it’s a wild ride, with Thompson’s good friend, Johnny Depp, embodying the author – or rather, his slightly fictionalized avatar, Raoul Duke – as a mescaline-infused Wile E Coyote. It might require digesting an entire chem lab to understand in the literal sense, but Gilliam’s surrealist odyssey still gets across Thompson’s main point: that America is decadent, depraved, and totally doomed. 

Emma Watson’s vapid heel turn is the highlight of Sofia Coppola’s crime satire about a group of California teenagers stealing from the rich to give to… themselves. Using social media to track the whereabouts of celebrities, the gang managed to burgle the homes of everyone from TV personality Audrina Patridge to Megan Fox before their inevitable downfall. Coppola adapted the film from a Vanity Fair article, and turned it into something like Mean Girls as imagined by Harmony Korine.

A dispirited post-war London backdrops this terrific, tough-to-watch take on journalist Ludovic Kennedy's account of serial killer John Christie. It depicts the darkest moments of his decade-long murder spree in west London in bleak detail, including the execution of an innocent man (John Hurt) for his crimes. Richard Attenborough struggled with the aftertaste of portraying this monster on screen – and no wonder.

It’s pretty much all there in the title. When it comes to movies set in the world’s most infamous prison, 1962’s The Birdman of Alcatraz is perhaps better remembered, but director Don Siegel’s hard-knuckled thriller starring Clint Eastwood is lean, mean and pulpy in the way of other Siegel-Eastwood collabs such as Dirty Harry. It's based on an account by San Francisco Chronicle journo J Campbell Bruce and stars Eastwood as Frank Miller, a lifer who orchestrated a daring breakout from the Rock the same year the aforementioned Burt Lancaster film was released.