Raging Bull, Oppenheimer and Marie Antoinette
The biopic is a peculiar beast: the closer you look at the genre, the less similar it is in general to genre. Of course, many of them have an instantly recognizable formula — the Oscar-winning hybrid of melodrama and history lesson that came to dominate mid-range filmmaking in the 2000s and 2010s.
But what's striking about this pattern is how little the best examples of the form have to do with it. Take The Theory of Everything, Stephen Hawking's 2014 film starring Eddie Redmayne, and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer. While each tells the story of a great 20th-century scientific thinker, only the first, with its well-lit central performance, Wikipedia-like structure and inoffensively pretty aesthetic, is in the same box as Trumbo, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Imitation Game and «Unconquered».
Meanwhile, Nolan's film will shatter any box you try to shove it into: part of what makes Oppenheimer so moving is that everything he does seems inseparable from everything he talks about.
Hence the extremely diverse list. movies below. Truly great biopics can be made in any style, from musical to western; they can stick slavishly to the facts or capture the subject more impressionistically, with all the slant and ambiguity that film allows.
To select the top 40, I set just three ground rules. First, films should be seen first and foremost as stories about the life and work of a real person, so no veiled depictions like The Master or alternate histories like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Second, their main focus should be one or two specific individuals, rather than broader historical moments (sorry, «Zone of Interest»). And third: they should be dramatized, if only because taking documentaries into account would make the task impossible.
I then promptly broke the whole thing repeatedly, although I decided to look at it as evidence of how difficult it is to secure a form when it's at its best. So here are my 40 favorite films in this perhaps not-quite-genre, spanning nearly a century, from silent classics to Nolan's favorite Best Picture.
40. Rocket Man (2019)
Dexter Fletcher's irrepressible musical follows Elton John from childhood to pop immortality, pulling no punches and carefully dissecting each hit for maximum biographical significance. And Taron Egerton's starring turn as Reginald Dwight's ex is perhaps the best modern example of a «spectacular» turn in a leading role: though it looks and sounds, Elton's spirit is truly unmistakable.
39.The Elephant Man (1980)
It may be unfair, but compassion is not a word usually associated with David Lynch films. But the author of Mulholland Drive reflects with unusual candor on our need for dignity and empathy in this darkly atmospheric tale of the unfortunate fate of the disfigured Victorian John (or in real life Joseph) Merrick. John Hurt's outstanding central turn was some of his best work, despite prosthetics that made him personally unrecognizable: however, as Lynch intended, his humanity shines through.
The Elephant Man (1980). Photo: Christophel Collection/Alamy Stock Photo 38. Miner's Daughter(1980)
If the music star biopic has become one of the more formulaic subtypes of the form, it's probably because many have taken their cue from Michael Apted's excellent retelling of the rise of country singer Loretta Lynn, which more or less refined the now traditional approach. off. With a mesmerizingly versatile performance from lead Sissy Spacek, who also sings all the numbers herself, it's a gripping, low-key rags-to-riches drama with dirt under your fingernails and a tumultuous love story between the brilliant but vulnerable Lynn and her husband Dolittle (Tommy Lee Jones). its basis.
Miner's Daughter (1980) Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo 37. Chariots of Fire ( 1981)
It may no longer be fashionable, but Hugh Hudson's account of the friendship between two British runners at the 1924 Olympics, Scottish evangelical Eric Liddell and Cambridge-educated Jew Harold Abrahams, is imbued with a courage and sincerity that is all too rarely seen. seen in cinemas since its release. This is a wonderful film about the value of faith and, perhaps even more so, the power of history—both its creation and how to live by it. And, of course, Vangelis' immortal score gives the drama a cosmic touch.
Ben Cross and Ian Charleson in Chariots of Fire (1981) Photo: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo 36. Silkwood (1983)
Who killed Karen Silkwood? That was the title of the nonfiction book about the life and mysterious 1974 death of an Oklahoman nuclear weapons whistleblower—and the question remained unresolved at the end of Mike Nichols' tense dramatization of the work, which gave Meryl Streep the first of her now extensive catalog of real-life roles. Streep disappears into this rich and slightly eccentric female role, written for her by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, and almost certainly would have won the Academy Award for Best Actress if she had not won it a year earlier for Sophie's Choice.
Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983) Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo 35. Jackie (2016)< p>Pablo Larraín's Portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy in Broken Glass features the incomparable Natalie Portman as the former first lady who suddenly finds herself the last holdout to the post-war American Dream, grappling with the strange and troubling new order that has emerged since her death. death of her husband.
34. Angel at my table (1990)
New Zealand's Jane Campion made a dramatic second foray into biographical territory in 2009 with her diaphanously beautiful Bright Star, about the romance between poets John Keats and Fanny Brawne. But her first, almost two decades ago, was the film that brought her to international attention: an often bleak but always stunningly beautiful portrait of her compatriot, the writer Janet Frame, capped by a stormy performance from Kerry Fox. It's a wise and compassionate film about the toll a great creative mind can take on the foundation of something that was just beginning.
Angel at My Table (1990) Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo 33. Van Gogh (1991)
The Wikipedia tabs approach to the biopic was decisively rejected by France's Maurice Pialat in this chronicle of the Dutch master's last 67 days under the tutelage of his patron Dr. Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise. With Jacques Dutronc playing the title role, the film is less about the artist's life than his approach to death: largely apocryphal events include frolics in a Parisian brothel and an extramarital affair with Gachet's comely daughter. Spectators vainly hoping to see the most popular paintings “Sunflowers”, “Starry Night”, etc., should be more than compensated by the magnificent pictorial compositions of Pialat.
Was this the moment when the biopic finally fell off the mantelpiece and crashed? After so many sharply compelling films about great lives emerged in the 1980s, François Girard dropped into his audience's laps a shoebox full of detritus—interviews, reenactments, even animation—that suggested that the greatness of life might be partly based on her inability to be so careful. in frame. The great pianist himself is played by Colm Feore, who we never see touching the keys of his instrument.
31. Erin Brockovich (2000)
From Che Guevara to Liberace, the ever-busy Steven Soderbergh has been repeatedly and fruitfully inspired by remarkable real lives. But chief among them is this underdog legal drama that gave Julia Roberts one of her greatest roles ever: a vehicle for her peerless movie star glamor, ready for exciting off-road turns.
Julia Roberts in the film “Erin Brockovich” (2000). Photo: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo 30. “The Puppeteer”(1993)
Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien has crafted this tale of venerable glove puppeteer Lee Tian-lu at the cutting edge of documentary and drama, mixing the 84-year-old's performance showcase with his first-person reflections on the past and recreated scenes from his turbulent youth. With utmost sensitivity, Taiwan's own troubled past is presented as a parallel storyline, while occupation and war shape the art of this humble master.
29. Blessing (2021)
Terence Davies's career ended with a magnificent diptych of poets' lives: 2015's A Quiet Passion about Emily Dickinson and this harrowing chronicle of Siegfried Sassoon's post-World War II wanderings, starring the superb Jack Lowden, in which the old wars — global, emotional and spiritual — take their toll .
28. Zola (2020)
David Fincher's soon-to-be-released film may have set the stage, but no film has ever captured the frenzy of social media as insightfully as Janicza Bravo's dramatization of the viral 2015 Twitter thread featuring Asia King, a 19-year-old waitress and stripper part-time, with bated breath, remembers the chaotic trip to Florida.
Taylor Page plays Zola. Photo: courtesy of A24 Films 27. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
Both pen and sword prove equally powerful in Paul Schrader's frantic account of the life and work of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, which combines expressionist passages from his three novels with more sober episodes from his younger years and the day he died. It's a haunting film about obsession, with its subject depicted as the sort of ideologically fixated warrior-monk figure that Schrader gravitated toward again and again—in his scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, as well as in almost everything else he worked on. continued to work. direct.
Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, c. 1969 Photo: Bernard Krishner/Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 26. The Passion of Joan of Arc(1928)
Based on original trial transcripts but entirely devoid of historical context or even plot, Carl Theodor Dreyer's dramatization of the trial of a 15th-century French martyr now represents perhaps the definitive example of silent film as an art form. The film, which unfolds almost entirely in close-up, is particularly focused on lead actress Renee Falconetti, whose facial expressions of flashes of agony and ecstasy are more or less a movie strength. The film has a justifiably fearsome academic reputation, but watching it in the cinema remains an extremely moving experience.
René Falconetti in The Passion of Jeanne d& #39;Ark» (1928). Photo: Historical Image Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. 25. Fitzcarraldo (1982)
The lives of holy fools form a large part of Werner Herzog's filmography, but the Bavarian maverick may have found the best example in Carlos Fitzcarrald, the Peruvian rubber baron whose steamboat was once dragged over a mountain ridge as a shortcut to his destination. rich new area. Having changed Fitzcarald's nationality to Irish, Herzog eventually cast (after several false starts) his regular collaborator Klaus Kinski: the four-year shoot in the Amazon was pure hell, but the results represent the insane pinnacle of the pair's collective efforts. Perhaps the film only feels complete once you add in Les Blanc's companion documentary Burden of Dreams, which positions Herzog as a mirror to Fitzcarald's manic pursuit (in the German director's words) of conquest of the useless.
Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog (1982) Photo: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo 24. Funny Girl(1968 )
Is Barbra Streisand's first film — a strapped-to-the-rafters adaptation of William Wyler's Broadway musical in which she recently starred — about the life and career of early 20th-century actress and comedian Fanny Brice? Or is it just Barbra Streisand? It's a kind of mirrored biopic, its intended plot both reinforced and refracted by Streisand's burgeoning screen persona, which here leaps onto the screen almost fully formed. It's a real old-fashioned tour de force, in which Streisand's enormous talent seems as impossible as an oncoming oil tanker, and all possible objections become futile: «Don't rain on my parade» is about right.
Barbra Streisand in the film Funny Girl (1968). Photo: Allstar Picture Library Limited./Alamy Stock Photo 23. My Vengeance (1979)
In 1963, conman Akira Nishiguchi carried out a killing spree that swept Japan as he evaded arrest for more than two months. Shohei Imamura's poignantly gruesome adaptation of Nishiguchi's life story unfolds as an investigation, starting with the arrest, then tracing the murders themselves through his childhood and early adulthood, and finally to their sad aftermath. The murders are nihilistically pointless — random but precise — and the great Ken Ogata (also a Mishima star, just above) is terrifyingly believable as an ordinary nobody who commits them with icy detachment.
22. Star 80(1983)
Bob Fosse's latest film about the murder of Playboy model Dorothy Stratten by her husband Paul Snyder alarmed many critics upon its release. No wonder: it's a very creepy, lustful and unpleasant watch, but only because Fosse so successfully exploits and weaponizes the male desire that fueled Stratten's career, and ultimately his demise. Mariel Hemingway is great in the title role, but Eric Roberts's career-long performance as Snyder exposes the part self-loathing, part self-gratifying pimp mentality that underlies the exploitation dynamic.
< img src="/wp-content/uploads /2024/03/1f011787fad11d9b276e23f6fd386086.jpg" /> Bob Fosse Stars at 80 (1983) Photo: Maximum Film/Alamy Stock Photo 21. Caravaggio (1986)
There's no such thing as an easy Derek Jarman, but his mid-career portrait of the Italian Baroque artist serves as a delightful summation of his favorite themes: homosexual desire and identity, and their undeniable intersection with the creative process. With Dexter Fletcher and Nigel Terry as the rakish artist himself, and Sean Bean and Tilda Swinton as his main loves and muses, it's a stunningly beautiful watch, in which dreamy late-Renaissance paintings are playfully spiced with idiosyncrasies — a motorcycle here, a solar… powerful calculator — it is nonsense that flies in the face of the cinematic literalism to which Jarman's career was a rousing rebuke.
Caravaggio (1986) Photo: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo 20. Schindler's List (1993)
The Holocaust film is a distinct subgenre with rules, foibles and shortcomings that were recently laid bare by Jonathan Glaser's fearless, convention-defying film Zone of Interest. But the form may have been perfected by Steven Spielberg in this monumental work that portrays Liam Neeson as the German industrialist who saved the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust at great personal risk.
Schindler's List (1993) Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo 19. Queen Christina (1933)
Greta Garbo found one of her career-defining performances in this brilliant pre-Code period play about a 17th-century Swedish monarch who romances John Gilbert's swarthy Spanish envoy during a secret excursion from the palace in disguise. Director Rouben Mamoulian brings to the fore the sensuality and poise of Garbo's performance: there is an incredible scene in which she «memorizes» the room in which she and Gilbert make love, stroking and smelling its surfaces in order to better remember the encounter later. It's a wonderfully unabashed wave of early Hollywood excitement, just before the Hays Code restrictions came into effect.Greta Garbo in the film Queen Christina (1933). Photo: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo 18. The Insider(1999)
After exposing corruption in the tobacco industry, Jeffrey Wigand's life turns into a paranoid thriller — so who better to bring it to the screen than Michael Mann? The Heat director's steely ability to balance action and tension, as well as the perfect use of Russell Crowe and Al Pacino as Wiegand and a TV news producer revealing his secrets, make this man-hunter film exemplary for corporate cinema. age.
Al Pacino in the film “The Insider” (1999) Photo: Maximum Film/Alamy Stock Photo 17. The Irishman ( 2019) )
Martin Scorsese (who we'll be hearing from again soon) began the latter part of his career with this magisterial crime epic about mob hitman Frank Sheeran, which remakes 20th-century American politics and capitalism as the ultimate criminal enterprise. Bringing Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino together for the first time only intensified the feeling of the inexorable turning of the great wheels of history.
At the same time that Scorsese was reinventing the crime film based on a true story (again, more on that below), Warren Beatty and director Barry Levinson edited this brilliant throwback to Ben «Bugsy» Siegel, the American gangster who, essentially , conceived Las Vegas as we know it. Know that. Steeped in glamor and romance (Beatty's future wife Annette Bening plays his girlfriend Virginia Hill), the film positions Siegel as a classic starry-eyed dreamer, his bright, seductive visions a shining monument to a now sadly long-lost type.
< img src="/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/31d45b2cd77142f653ee41a6a8bb1ef8.jpg" />Elliot Gould and Warren Beatty in Bugsy (1991). Photo: United Archives GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo 15. Edvard Munch (1974)
The stark mockumentary style of Peter Watkins' three-hour film about the Norwegian Expressionist painter has a time-capsule quality: as if the British director had spent ten years hanging around with Munch himself, absorbing the surrounding details of his life and times. to better reveal its topic. But it is in his arrangement of this supposed «raw material» — in the non-linear swirls and swirls that surround recurring moments and motifs — that there is a full, cumulatively overwhelming sense of his subject's genius.
Edvard Munch (1974) Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo 14. The Social Network (2010)
In which David Fincher pinpoints the exact moment when the online rot of the 21st century began. Since its publication, this serpentine account of the founding of Facebook has often been described as a modern-day Citizen Kane — a thrilling comparison back then, but one that has aged alarmingly well. Fine. The site's head, Mark Zuckerberg, memorably played by Jesse Eisenberg, is a storm of vengeful, resentment-fueled egoism that sets the tone for the coming media age.
Mike Leigh's 1999 film Coup, about Gilbert and Sullivan's writing of The Mikado, was instantly recognized as one of his best works. But he complemented this with a later character study of the great Romantic artist, starring Timothy Spall, which evoked an even richer sense of time and place, capturing the whimsical, tumultuous flow of English Victorian style. artistic genius.
12. My Darling Clementine (1946)
Many films have been made about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the infamous 1881 Oak Corral shootout, but the first and last word remains John Ford's hauntingly beautiful and melancholic look at the circumstances that led to the legendary shootout. Ford's carefully crafted compositions have the enveloping, ghostly romance of Rembrandt's paintings — you'd swear you were actually standing in that salon, helplessly staring at Linda Darnell while spilled beer tugged at the soles of your boots — while the rich, brotherly chemistry between Henry Earp Fonda and Victor Mature's Holliday are highly addictive.
Linda Darnell and Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine ( 1946) Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo 11. Marie Antoinette (2006)
Sofia Coppola serves up the final days of Versailles as a silver platter of iced scones, brilliantly blurring the lines between period theater and the explosion of pop art. It caused a storm at the film's Cannes premiere in 2006, not least because of the pair of Converse sneakers included in the young queen's shoe collection, but Coppola and her then 22-year-old lead Kirsten Dunst are in teenage mood here, making it clear that the greatness of the plot and the sharp modern resonance.
Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette (2006) Photo: Lee Johnson 10. Amadeus (1984)
Or perhaps it should be Salieri. Peter Shaffer's masterstroke in this adaptation of his 1979 play was to center the action on his protagonist's less gifted contemporary, making it both a gripping portrayal of creative rivalry and a portrait of genius from a crazy distance. Milos Forman, directing F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulse as Salieri and Mozart, disillusioned apprentice and wayward young prodigy, delights in the comic mixture of grandeur and pettiness that characterized the pair's bitter (and entirely fictional) feud.
Tom Hulce as Mozart in Amadeus (1984). Photo: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo 9. Malcolm X (1992)
Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reach the pinnacle of their powers in this sweeping, life-spanning civil rights epic. A notoriously troubled production (work on the script began in 1968), the enormous scale that Lee insisted on for his nearly three-and-a-half-hour opus proved to be its secret weapon. Washington's full-scale speech contained room not only for flamboyant impudence but also for subtle humanity, and the result may have led to a shift in public thinking on what was then a highly controversial topic.
Denzel Washington in Malcolm X (1992) Photo: Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock Photo 8. I'm Not There (2007)
For a subject as elusive and multifaceted as Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes has found the perfect approach: multiple Dylans, played by a half-dozen actors in a kaleidoscopic series of vignettes inspired by his life and work. Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin—you wouldn't necessarily pick one of them to definitively play the singer-songwriter, but through this grid of subterfuges, Haynes triangulates a higher level dazzlingly. true.
Heath Ledger as one of the six Bob Dylans in the film “I’m Not There” (2007) Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo 7. Ed Wood (1994)
Tim Burton's tender, moving tribute to 1950s king Z The B-movie is exactly the inverted achievement it should be: a stunning film about the man responsible for some of the worst films ever made. This is the strongest of Burton's eight collaborations with Johnny Depp. She captures vintage Hollywood in all its glamor and squalor and makes a compelling case for noble failure as the ultimate underdog art.
Johnny Depp in Ed Wood (1994) 6. Oppenheimer (2023)
What the master physicist, played by the perfectly cast Cillian Murphy, did to the atom, Nolan's film does to the biopic itself: it thrillingly breaks the form wide open, sending pure cinematic energy racing back and forth through history and reimagining the detonation of the atom. The atomic bomb as the final postmodern act. For such a recent release it admittedly ranks dangerously high on the list, but while its ranking may settle over time, it feels (to me anyway) like a release for the ages.
5. The Wind Rises (2013)
Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi was an unlikely character in this late Ghibli historical epic in which military the hero's suffering was woven into the plot of an unrelated pre-war novel by Tatsuo Hori. It was Hayao Miyazaki's Powell and Pressburger: a national masterpiece with grippingly personal stakes.
The Wind Rises (2013) 4. Raging Bull (1980)
Guilt and redemption are the cornerstones of many of Martin Scorsese's films, and in this vibrant monochrome drama that chronicles the rise and fall of former middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, the two come together hand in hand. Robert De Niro, at his mesmerizing best, shows LaMotta as a fallen man whose punishment in the ring is the cost of his own behavior outside of it. Both sinner and savior, he struggles with the demons of inner diversity; his own body is a battlefield, his own blood is a sacrament.
Robert De Niro in Raging Bull (1980) Photo: Photo 12/Alami 3. Andrei Rublev (1966)
There are visionary directors, and then there is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose largely fictional account of the life of a 15th-century icon painter is conceived on such a huge scale that even God would gulp. This is medieval Russia as a walking epic; our hero stumbles through battles and corruption-scarred terrain during the raging Tatar invasion.
Andrei Rublev (1966) Photo : ScreenProd/Photononstop/Alamy Stock Photo 2. Goodfellas (1990)
Nowadays we may only think of gangster films as being made before or after Goodfellas, but Martin Scorsese's high-voltage masterpiece marries time and time with a thousand-volt excitement. On the one hand, it's a seemingly viable fantasy that involves Ray Liotta's Henry Hill in a life of organized crime; on the other hand, it is an increasingly disturbing present in which this life must unfold chaotically. Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 book Wiseguy, about Hill's meteoric rise from mob enforcer to FBI informant, it shows one of our greatest directors working at a level that few others have ever matched, and, What's even better is that it makes it feel like a breeze. .
Ray Liotta in Goodfellas (1990) Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo 1. Lawrence Arabian(1962)
Perhaps the most famous scene in all of cinema: the match, extinguished by one puff of Peter O'Toole's parted lips, turns into the sun rising over the desert horizon. This luxury of editor Anne V. Coates's head-, heart-, and soul-grabbing epic of T. E. Lawrence has been (rightly) praised to death, but it is still the best expression of the film's undeniable greatness. Intimacy meets immensity in one breath: this is life itself in the film, and no one surpasses it.
Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole in the film «Lawrence of Arabia» (1962). Photo: FlixPix/Alamy Stock Photo
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