The 32 greatest biopics of all time

A great movie needs a great main character, and some of the best characters in all of cinema come from real life. Biopics are a staple of the big screen, and for good reason, as history is full of fascinating people who accomplished great (and sometimes terrible) things. Skilled filmmakers know exactly how to tell those stories.

To be fair, not all biopics are good. A lot of them can fall into the trap of being too formulaic, as if you're telling a rags-to-riches tale, especially about a figure who is already famous; chances are, audiences are going to be familiar with the tropes and the plot beats. The greatest biopics, though, can be revelatory, offering a unique, insightful take on a figure viewers only thought they knew or highlighting somebody they'd never heard of before.

As is always the case with movies that are based on a true story, some fudging of historical accuracy tends to be part of the course, but the hope is that any liberties with the truth are in service of the art. So, here, then, are the 32 greatest biopics ever made.

32. Rush

Year: 2013
Director: Ron Howard

Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl star as James Hunt and Niki Lauda, two of the most famous Formula One drivers whose rivalry was famed, too. The steady hand of Ron Howard guides the movie through the two racers' lives, contrasting Hunt's wealth, cocky confidence, and innate skill with Lauda's precision and determination. Their lives intersect on and off the racetrack, especially after an infamous accident. Rush is a pretty great sports movie in addition to being a biopic of not one but two fascinating characters.

31. Walk the Line

Year: 2005
Director: James Mangold

It's not Walk the Line's fault that it was the main target of the musician biopic parody Walk the Line—a comedy so blisteringly eviscerating that it basically killed the subgenre for several years. While the tropes were indeed ripe for satirizing, James Mangold's film about the iconic singer-songwriter Johnny Cash is an expertly made drama, boasting great performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon as Cash and June Carter, respectively. (They did their own singing, and they sound great to boot.)

30. Darkest Hour

Year: 2017
Director: Joe Wright

Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill, the legendary (if deservedly controversial) wartime leader of Great Britain during World War II. One of the biopics that only covers a limited period of its subject's life, rather than being a cradle-to-grave affair, Darkest Hour shows Churchill's earliest days as prime minister during the outbreak of the war. Not only does he need to deal with the Nazi onslaught; he also must face political opponents, too. Oldman won the Oscar for his portrayal of the singular historical figure.

29. Straight Outta Compton

Year: 2019
Director: F. Gary Gray

O'Shea Jackson Jr. plays his real-life dad, Ice Cube, in this music biopic about the rise, fall, and reunion of the pioneering West Coast rap group N.W.A. Following Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E (the latter two played by Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell), the movie offers a portrait of a provocative music scene. The specificity of the gangsta rap group's Compton origins (the film takes its name from the group's first album) and their role in '90s pop culture, along with race and police relations, set Straight Outta Compton apart from many tired music biopics with all their familiar tropes.

28. Spencer

Year: 2021
Director: Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín's Spencer only covers three days of Princess Diana of Wales (née: Spencer), but it's a haunting psychological portrait of a woman who is simultaneously at the peak of wealth and power while also being totally adrift. Kristen Stewart plays Diana, imbuing the '90s icon with a deep sense of melancholy and unease as she spends Christmas with the rest of the royal family in 1991, just as her marriage to Prince Charles is becoming incontrovertibly undone. At times, Spencer has the vibe of a horror movie, and it will make you understand—and feel for—Princess Diana in new ways.

27. Shattered Glass

Year: 2003
Director: Billy Ray

Hayden Christensen of Star Wars prequel fame gets a lot of grief for his acting ability (or alleged lack thereof), but any haters should watch Shattered Glass, an exceptional journalism movie that shows what Christensen can do in the right role. He plays Stephen Glass, who in the late '90s was a popular up-and-coming features writer for The New Republic who had a knack for finding unbelievable stories. The problem was they were unbelievable because many of them weren't true, and Shattered Glass follows the serial fabulist as he's exposed, the uneasy tension coming through in every twitch of Christensen's performance.

26. Gods and Monsters

Year: 1998
Director: Bill Condon

This film about the last days of James Whale, the director of the horror masterpieces Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, who was also a gay man in mid-century Hollywood, is arguably fictionalized to the point where it shouldn't be eligible to be considered a great biopic. Starring Ian McKellen, the bulk of the film follows Whale's complicated relationship with his gardener, a fictional character played by Brendan Fraser. And yet, despite the liberties, it's a deeply moving and revealing look at a somewhat forgotten Hollywood figure, one that plays with the at-times horrible themes of memory, aging, self-expression, and repression.

25. Sully

Year: 2016
Director: Clint Eastwood

Tom Hanks (something of a biopic all-star) plays Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot responsible for the Miracle on the Hudson, when the US Airways pilot safely and successfully landed his plane in the water off of New York City after a post-takeoff run-in with birds took out both his engines. All 155 souls survived without injury. Although director Clint Eastwood inflates the stakes a bit with an exaggerated investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board that seems to suggest Sully's reputation is in danger, the film remains a tight, gripping tale of a man who might just be the epitome of grace under pressure.

24. Selma

Year: 2014
Director: Ava DuVernay

David Oyelowo stars as Martin Luther King Jr. in one of the great movies about the fight for Civil Rights. This Ava DuVernay-directed film follows King, as well as many other members of the movement and some of their segregationist opponents, in the lead-up to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, with the movie climaxing with the famous and influential march. For such an important and still quite relevant part of history, the Civil Rights struggle is often depicted with a staginess that Selma deftly avoids, and Oyelowo's performance feels like the real, passionate figure he was.

23. Spartacus

Year: 1960
Director: Stanley Kubrick

Spartacus is such a totemic and influential film, one that more or less established the tropes that every gladiator movie that followed would emulate, that you'd perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that the title character, a slave-turned-gladiator-turned-rebel played by Kirk Douglas, was a real guy. Of course, the slave rebellion he led, the Third Servile War, began in 73 BC, so there's plenty of fictionalization to his story to fill in history's many gaps. Luckily, those gaps have been filled with iconic performances, thrilling action, an earnest love story, and quotes like "I am Spartacus."

22. The Wolf of Wall Street

Year: 2013
Director: Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese's black comedy is about the rise and fall of one specific corrupt Wall Street type, Jordan Belfort, but part of the genius of the film is how it feels universal despite ostensibly being a story about this one guy's fraudulent behavior. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Belfort, and the uproarious, enraging, and always engaging movie follows him as he goes from a small-time Long Island broker to an unfathomably wealthy reverse-Robin Hood. He gets his comeuppance, but seeing as he was also immortalized in this fun movie—a film that's so watchable its message is sometimes overlooked—did he really?

21. Gandhi

Year: 1982
Director: Richard Attenborough

The '80s were full of sweeping, lengthy biographical epics, including 1982's Gandhi, which starred Ben Kingsley as the titular Indian independence leader. Although not quite cradle-to-grave, Gandhi is an exhaustively thorough recounting of its subject's life. While some other, less-successful movies from this era feel their length and self-importance, Gandhi doesn't feel bloated thanks to the Oscar-winning lead performance, Richard Attenborough's steady hand as a director, and the sheer scope and importance of Mahatma Gandhi's life.

20. Braveheart

Year: 1995
Director: Mel Gibson

"They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!" Mel Gibson directs and stars in Braveheart, one of the great war movies that tells the story of the famed Scottish warrior William Wallace in his fight for independence against England's King Edward I. This epic has it all—lavish costumes, incredibly brutal battle sequences, romance, and high-stakes historical drama. Are there loads of historical inaccuracies in Braveheart, including the fact that Scots in the early 1300s wouldn't have worn belted plaid kilts? Sure, but the film remains an exciting, inspiring tale.

19. Reds

Year: 1981
Director: Warren Beatty

Warren Beatty wrote, directed, and starred in this immense biographical epic about John Reed, an American journalist who documented Russia's October Revolution and the rise of communism—a philosophy Reed strongly believed in. Reds is one of the greatest movies about being swept up in the tides of history, and you see how Reed and his wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) tried to balance their small personal lives with the overwhelming force of global events.

18. Catch Me If You Can

Year: 2002
Director: Steven Spielberg

Catch Me If You Can, which is quietly one of the best Christmas movies and low-key has one of John Williams' best scores, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr., a young con man in the '60s who made loads of money forging checks and posing as a Pan Am pilot. Tom Hanks plays the FBI agent who tries, again and again, to catch him. While there are some doubts as to how true Abagnale's story really was, it doesn't take away from how stylish and propulsively fun Catch Me If You Can is.

17. Captain Phillips

Year: 2013
Director: Paul Greengrass

Tom Hanks plays the titular Richard Phillips, the captain of a cargo ship who was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009. An intense, gripping movie about an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, Captain Phillips boasts two incredible performances. Somali-American actor Barkhad Abdi, who made his screen debut in this film, was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the intimidating yet sympathetic leader of the pirates. Hanks, of course, is fantastic too, especially at the end when he's allowed to break down.

16. Capote

Year: 2005
Director: Bennett Miller

A riveting Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Truman Capote, the iconic and singular American novelist best known for writing In Cold Blood, arguably one of the earliest works of true crime. In an Academy Award-winning performance, Hoffman captures Capote's many quirks and eccentricities as the writer investigates the Clutter family murders that became the subject of his book, in the process becoming perhaps a little too close to the killers. Catherine Keener co-stars as Capote's friend, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee.

15. Oppenheimer

Year: 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan

The highest-grossing biopic of all time, propelled to the top spot in part by the release of Barbie the same weekend that created the "Barbenheimer" double-feature sensation, Oppenheimer is an epic about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy leads an all-star cast as the controversial theoretical physicist, and the movie follows his rise and the development of the bomb during the Manhattan Project, with a jaw-dropping explosive sequence at about the film's midpoint during the Trinity Test. But the second half, which deals with the fallout (literal and figurative) of his creation, is the haunting stuff that will stick with you when the credits roll.

14. Lincoln

Year: 2012
Director: Steven Spielberg

Daniel Day-Lewis absolutely embodies Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg's biopic about one of the greatest American presidents. Set towards the end of the Civil War, Lincoln follows the president's attempts to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, passed. At times, Honest Abe needs to do some borderline dishonest stuff, but he always for an important cause. It's a masterful process movie that shows—in not-at-all dry, quite entertaining fashion—how the political sausage was made.

13. Milk

Year: 2008
Director: Gus Van Sant

Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist who in the 1970s became one of the first openly gay people to be elected to office, where he served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. An inspiring, moving film about the joy of progress and the sacrifice it can entail, Milk follows its subject as he works towards equality as he betters his city—and his fateful working relationship with another Supervisor, the conservative Dan White (Josh Brolin).

12. GoodFellas

Year: 1990
Director: Martin Scorsese

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." So begins Martin Scorsese's great mob movie, which tells the story of real-life mobster Henry Hill, who rose up the ranks of New York's Lucchese crime family. He lived an ill-gotten life of criminal luxury until he was busted, and GoodFellas documents his rise and fall in funny (and violent) fashion. Ray Liotta plays Hill, with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci in major supporting roles.

11. Erin Brockovich

Year: 2000
Director: Steven Soderbergh

A shoo-in for any list of great legal dramas, in addition to a must-have on a biopic round-up, Erin Brockovich stars Julia Roberts as the title character, the woman largely responsible for a major environmental lawsuit despite not being a lawyer. Brockovich's tenaciousness and resourcefulness are exactly what's needed to get justice for the residents of a California town who have been poisoned by groundwater contamination from a powerful utilities company, and Roberts is winning in the role.

10. The Elephant Man

Year: 1980
Director: David Lynch

One of David Lynch's more accessible films, The Elephant Man is a poignant drama based on the life of Joseph Merrick, a severely deformed man who was exploited in freak shows and became famous in late 19th-century London. John Hurt plays Merrick, while Anthony Hopkins plays the surgeon Frederick Treves, one of the first people to see past Merrick's exterior and see the humanity—and hurt—within. Shot in black and white, The Elephant Man is also responsible for the creation of the Best Makeup Oscar, as there was outrage that the movie didn't get any recognition for its incredible achievement.

9. Moneyball

Year: 2011
Director: Bennett Miller

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics who helped revolutionize baseball with the team's 2002 season. An incredible sports movie that happens to focus on a behind-the-scenes guy rather than an all-star player (one of the things that made the A's success so exciting was that they didn't have any real all-stars in the lineup, just a bunch of bargain bin players who Beane knew could collectively score runs), Moneyball is one of the most purely watchable films ever made.

8. 12 Years a Slave

Year: 2013
Director: Steve McQueen

An unflinching film that's at times grueling to watch (as it should be), 12 Years a Slave tells the story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery for a dozen years in the mid-1800s. An astounding Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Northup, and he conveys all the suffering, pain, and determination that he endures. Importantly, although 12 Years a Slave is centered on Northup (and based on his own 1853 memoir), it makes it very clear that his horrific experience was an exception. The vast majority of slaves in the American South suffered their entire lives, not just a decade or change.

7. Schindler's List

Year: 1993
Director: Steven Spielberg

Never forget that the same year he released Jurassic Park, one of the ultimate popcorn blockbusters, Steven Spielberg also released Schindler's List, a gripping, harrowing historical drama that's probably the definitive movie about the Holocaust. Truly, he can do it all. Liam Neeson stars as Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved the lives of thousands of Polish Jews from Nazi death camps during World War II. It's a masterpiece, one that's hard to watch but never feels like homework.

6. The Social Network

Year: 2010
Director: David Fincher

The Social Network is a biopic about arguably the single most important person of the century: Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. (Note: "important" does not mean "good.") The Aaron Sorkin-penned film stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, following him as he first develops what would become Facebook while at Harvard, to its early days as a massive company—with plenty of falling outs and backstabbing. ("You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.") It's a deeply unflattering portrait, and deservedly so.

5. Ed Wood

Year: 1994
Director: Tim Burton

Johnny Depp plays Ed Wood, a 1950s filmmaker who was infamous for his cheap genre flicks, including Plan 9 From Outer Space, a sci-fi picture commonly called the worst movie ever made. But Tim Burton's loving, funny biopic is a celebration of Wood's creative zeal, even if his execution left a little bit to be desired. A great showbiz movie, Ed Wood is a charming look at a unique, passionate individual who deserves respect… even if the movies he made were, in fact, pretty bad. Martin Landau co-stars as Bela Lugosi, the washed-up former Dracula actor who falls into Wood's social circle. Landau won an Oscar for his moving performance.

4. The Last Emperor

Year: 1987
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

The Last Emperor, a sweeping, cradle-to-grave epic about the life of China's last emperor, Puyi, swept the Oscars, winning all nine awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture. The accolades were worthy. A visually stunning movie (the first Western production to film inside the Forbidden Palace where Puyi and generations of emperors before him lived), The Last Emperor is a moving story about an imperfect individual in turbulent times. As a child, Puyi was told he was a god, but when revolution strikes China, he finds himself a refugee, leader of a puppet state, and eventually a prisoner in the Cultural Revolution. Even someone as powerful as an emperor is nothing compared to the forces of history.

3. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Year: 1985
Director: Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader's fascinating biopic tackles a fascinating—and controversial—figure, Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. In the '50s and '60s, Mishima became one of postwar Japan's greatest authors, a profoundly talented and influential artist who was also an ultranationalist. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters mostly takes place on November 25, 1970, the day that he and a few members of the private army he'd inspired attempted a coup d'état to reinstate the emperor of Japan, committing seppuku when it failed. These events are interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood and upbringing, along with stylized adaptations of a few of his most celebrated works, all of which are quite revealing.

2. Malcolm X

Year: 1992
Director: Spike Lee

Arguably, both Denzel Washington and Spike Lee's greatest cinematic achievement, Malcolm X, is an epic biopic that follows the revolutionary Black and human rights activist from his birth in Nebraska to his eventual assassination decades later in Harlem. It's massive (with a runtime to match), but Malcom X avoids being a rote biopic that dutifully hits all its beats by choosing vignettes of various times in its subject's life, like hitting rock bottom in prison, converting to Islam, and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. They add up to much more profound than the sum of their parts—just as any person, especially one as complex and important as Malcom X—is more than the sum of theirs.

1. Lawrence of Arabia

Year: 1962
Director: David Lean

There are few people whose lives were as ripe for being adapted into a biopic as T. E. Lawrence, so it's fortunate that his story was the subject of one of the greatest films ever made, David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. The epic stars Peter O'Toole as the British army officer who led an Arab campaign against the Ottoman Empire in World War I, finding himself torn between his allegiances to his country and the prospect of Arab self-determination, all while struggling with the violence and his natural excellence at warfare. If you ever get a chance to see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen—like at a revival theater—drop everything to check out all four hours of it.