Michael Finkel
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What makes a good movie based on a true story?
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- All the President's Men (1976) Film. Drama. 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?
- In Cold Blood (1967) Film. 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.
- Hustlers (2019) Film. Drama. A rare depiction of a r ecession 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.
- Argo (2012) Film. Drama. It’s one of those stories too far-fetched for even the most inventive screenwriter to make up. At the onset of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a movie-loving CIA agent hatched a plot to smuggle six diplomats out of the country by pretending to be a Canadian film crew shooting a fake Star Wars-alike sci-fi flick there.
- Selma
- The French Connection
- Schindler’s List
- The Sound of Music
- 12 Years A Slave
- Goodfellas
- Spotlight
- Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
- All The President’s Men
- Dog Day Afternoon
On March 7, 1965, as voting-rights demonstrators attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a march to the state capital in Montgomery, they were met by heavily armed police. The day would—known as “Bloody Sunday,” after 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries—would become a key moment in the fight a...
The complex drug trafficking scheme known as the French Connection was cooked up by Corsican gangsters in the 1930s: poppy seeds were shipped from Turkey and Lebanon to Marseille, a major French seaport, where they were processed into heroin, before being shipped out to U.S. By the 1960s, up to 44 tons were being moved in the U.S. yearly, prompting...
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg wanted the cast of his adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical novel to keep something in mind: “We’re not making a film, we’re making a document,” as he put it. Up until that point, there had been documentaries and European films about the Holocaust, but not a modern Hollywood blockbuster. Liam Neeson stars as th...
Julie Andrews running through the Austrian hills as Maria in the 1965 filmThe Sound of Music is perhaps one of the most well-known opening scenes in cinema history. Based on the memoir of the real Maria, the movie tells the storyof a free-spirited nun sent to become a governess for seven musical children, just before the start of World War II. As i...
Black British director Steve McQueen’s triple Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o, is “a raw, horrifying and essential document,” declared TIME’s film critic. Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northup, a free African-American man who was living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., when he was lured away and kidnapped i...
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” declares Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, protagonist ofMartin Scorsese’sGoodfellas, the 1990 classic crime film charting the rise and fall of a mafioso and his network in Italian-American Brooklyn. Viewers of the film, however, are left with plenty of reasons why a life in the mob might no...
Starring Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Michael Keaton as members of a real team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe,Spotlight shows the efforts of reporters to uncover the history of systematic sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Boston. The film is largely faithful to true events andbased on real people; in January 2002, the Bos...
Paul Newman and Robert Redford stole hearts and set a new standard for the buddy film when they portrayed notorious real-life outlaws Robert “Butch Cassidy” LeRoy Parker and Harry “The Sundance Kid” Longabaugh in 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. While the film begins with the disclaimer that “most of which follows is true,” in reality, th...
A younger generation might know Bob Woodward for his exhaustive chronicles of the Trump Administration in his booksFear: Trump in the White House and Rage. But nearly half a century earlier, he was uncovering the secrets of another president: Richard Nixon. In 1972, he and Washington Postcolleague Carl Bernstein began to investigate a break-in at t...
Al Pacino has played many criminal masterminds over the course of his career, but John Wojtowicz isn’t one of them. On a scorching 1972 summer day, the Vietnam War veteran made a clumsy attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank, only to be penned in with hostages for a 14-hour standoff. Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon depicts the agonizing time spent inside ...
- Francesca Gariano
- ‘Moneyball’ (2011) “Moneyball” brought Michael Lewis' 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” to the silver screen in 2011. The movie starred Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, a manager taxed with a small budget and an unconventional approach to beating the wealthier teams.
- ‘The Social Network’ (2010) “The Social Network” is based on the 2009 book “The Accidental Billionaires” about the founding of Facebook. Jesse Eisenberg takes on the role of Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2003 worked on a concept that ultimately became Facebook.
- ‘Hidden Figures’ (2016) “Hidden Figures” tells the true stories of three Black mathematicians at NASA. Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.
- ‘Spotlight’ (2015) Back in 2001, the editor of The Boston Globe assigned a team of journalists to investigate allegations made against a priest who was accused of molesting more than 80 boys.
Sep 27, 2022 · Pretty much any movie can be "based off a true story," but there are a select few that take real-life events and turn them into cinematic masterpieces. View our favorites here.
Jun 14, 2024 · The best movies based on true stories bring us face to face with the events that shape our world, providing timeless lessons relevant to audiences today.
- John Ortved
7.1 (22K) Rate. World War II: After an aerial battle over Norway, British and German airmen find themselves stranded in the wilderness. Finding shelter in the same cabin, they realize the only way to survive the winter is to set aside the rules of war.
May 11, 2023 · In Hollywood and beyond, great movies directly inspired by true stories are plentiful. They're weird, and shocking, and romantic, and downright too wild to be true – and here are the best.
