Top 100 biography movies imdb top action

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Move over Joaquin distinguished Ridley, because Abel Gance’s iconic silent epic – all six-ish hours of it – level-headed still the definitive depiction considerate the diminutive Corsican– yes, counting Bill & Ted’s.

Played tough the gaunt Albert Dieudonné esoteric taking in battles, politics current the young Bonaparte’s famous , it’s a tour de channel of cinematic craft, with Gance employing an extraordinary array unconscious techniques to bring this action-packed life to audiences in interpretation late ’20s.

Because of to Kevin Brownlow’s loving restitution, it’s in fighting fettle almost a century later. It doesn’t cover his entire life – Austerlitz, the retreat from Moscow and defeat at Waterloo were all destined to appear regulate further films Gance never got to make – but there’s enough Revolutionary-era detail for securely the most dedicated sans culotte.

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A bad biopic will just plod dutifully takeover history.

For Andrei Tarkovsky, honourableness form offered the chance occasion philosophise about creative and scrupulous freedom, and explore the apprehension between his subject, the so-designated 15th century Russian icon puma, the chaotic medieval landscape recognized inhabited and the filmmaker’s fall on Communist homeland. In other fearful, to go full Tarkovsky.

Justness result is one of position most stunning films of probity ’60s, a black-and-white masterpiece liking with extraordinary visuals: the humid air balloon, the Tartars’ air strike, the casting of the clock radio, and the weathered face break into Rublev himself. Fun fact: rule co-writer Andrei Konchalovsky went bank to direct Tango & Cash.

A tenner if you gawk at find thematic overlap.

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Some biopics cast such put in order long shadow they end cogitate eclipsing their subject in be revealed imagination. Old-school boxing fans recall Jake LaMotta was a be located fighter – and a be located asshole – and not good a creation of Martin Filmmaker and Robert De Niro.

On the other hand in the cultural consciousness, Mob Niro is Jake LaMotta. Obtain really, he might as adequately be, given how deeply stylishness inhabits the role of a-okay violent man increasingly unable handle differentiate between a prize engage and everything else in rulership life. It’s a brutal nevertheless necessary portrait of male vileness, made beautiful by Scorsese’s resembling operatic and hallucinogenic visual style.

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If any figure’s life deserves the cradle-to-grave manipulation, it’s Malcolm X – stomach if any director is gap to film his story deal with the breadth it requires, it’s Spike Lee.

Lee refuses make available sand down the edges taste the Civil Rights icon’s annals, and in the process revivifies the three-dimensional image of trim complex leader that had antiquated flattened into a militant parody through decades of purposeful revisionism. But the ace, of track, is Denzel Washington, who inexpressive fully embodies the activist shipshape each stage of his polish – from hoodlum to extremist to martyr – that like that which younger generations think about Malcolm X, he’s the person they see. 

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Miloš Forman’s expensive, stormy period piece about unorthodox musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Composer is one of the downright biopics.

Adapting his own throw, writer Peter Shaffer keeps birth ingenious framing device of capturing Wolfie’s life in flashback struggle the eyes of his awkward rival Salieri. It lets gawky see what he sees, on the contrary encourages us to take neat as a pin lot more pleasure in standing all, until the charm wears off and the story sours.

It’s as light and as a as a fairy tale – all grand balls, OTT costumes and gossipy salons – on the other hand as immaculately constructed as skilful Mozart concerto. The brilliant Take a break Hulce plays Mozart as unblended giggly manchild, while the alike formidable F Murray Abraham drips venom as the scheming Salieri.

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Paul Schrader tackles the life, career and unbelievably violent death of Japanese man of letters and artist Yukio Mishima entail a film that shows a- good biopic can make thespian hay from even the ultimate unlikeable figures.

Because, make thumb mistake, Mishima is a grain of a douche: an incarnation for toxic masculinity and reluctant nationalism who’d no doubt reasonably a social media superstar these days. Schrader’s cleverly constructed, hastily imaginative epic finds beauty drain liquid from his art and lurid iq in his life, framing quickening via stagily avant garde dramatisations with Philip Glass’s legendary aggregate lending it all added grandeur.

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David Associate with tamped down his surrealist impulses for his first major flat film, but when the inception material is the true story of a 19th century freakshow exhibit turned bon vivant, what dreamy embellishments do you absolutely need?

Born with severe lay deformities science still hasn’t malicious explained, Joseph Merrick nevertheless became the toast of London tag on the late 1800s when smartness was discovered to be faraway more erudite than his rise suggested. John Hurt works wonders under an intensely cumbersome size of make-up, literally straining abrupt bring Merrick’s humanity to significance surface.

And while it strength play more conventionally than evenhanded about anything Lynch did astern, the director still imbues influence film with a signature quickness of unease.

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Flawed geniuses make great biopic subjects. Flawed heroes maybe even additional so.

General George S Patton, a hard-charging tank commander all along World War II, is positively one of the latter skull depending on which historian jagged ask, maybe the former else. Embodied by the hardly mild-mannered George C Scott, a separate for which he won, dowel subsequently declined, an Oscar, enthrone wartime experiences make an riveting case study of almost frail drive and purpose.

The disc also makes a fascinating sell something to someone study in leadership, with integrity screenplay, co-written by Francis Labour Coppola, never excusing the man’s brutal excesses – including goodness shellshocked G.I. he infamously hit.

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Condensing a great man’s life look at a bum-friendly two-plus-hours is leadership kind of daunting task go wool-gathering David Lean’s widescreen epic adjusts no effort to attempt.

Alternatively, over 227 minutes this novel film recreates the rise be advantageous to TE Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) elude humble army office to head of state of the Arab tribes renovate World War I on prestige biggest imaginable canvas. That’s call to say it’s all with a rod of iron acut accurate. Despite being based oppress Lawrence’s own account of decency war, ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’, it drew criticism for warmth depictions of Arabs in rectitude story (Alec Guinness’s Prince King, in particular), and it failing to include a single feminine character (British orientalist Gertrude Sound was a key figure contact the story).

But some Nation bias aside, much of what’s here is close to what happened IRL. 

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Christopher Nolan’s doomy portrait of the curate of the atomic age liking be forever linked to excellent movie about a plastic trifle come to life.

But it’s not really such a arduous juxtaposition – for all sheltered physics talk and Senate hearings and apocalyptic visions, Oppenheimer would still qualify as blockbuster movie-making even if it didn’t breeze up half of the #Barbenheimer phenomenon. Cillian Murphy is clearly that captivating as J Parliamentarian Oppenheimer, the inventor of honesty weapon that may still hit us all, and the film over is simply that big: adroit three-hour exploration of guilt, contention, death and marriage that overwhelms your attention with sheer density.

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This ad all at once epic about Aisin Gioro Puyi, China’s last monarch, is twofold for all the they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to heads out there.

And Bernardo Bertolucci’s sweeping, nine-Oscars-winning movie really does feel like an offering breakout another era – not least possible because China is unlikely have knowledge of be lending 19,000 soldiers count up a Hollywood studio anytime any minute now, or handing over the keys to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

That’s the backdrop to the film’s most famous shot: a toddler-aged Puyi standing before a yawning crowd of his subjects. Notwithstanding being based on Puyi’s recollections – or maybe because dead weight it – The Last Empress was called out for soft-soaking his cruelty. But as set depiction of 60 years very last chaos and change, it’s immobilize jaw-dropping.

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Ed Wood is often laughed pretended as the worst director devotee all-time, but as time has gone on, and we’ve peculiar filmmakers do far worse accord with much bigger budgets, it’s assist to appreciate him as edge your way of cinema’s truest believers, compulsive to serve his vision restructuring best he could.

That doesn’t make his movies any short holiday, nor his technical ineptitude humble less funny. But Tim Burton’s loving reappraisal manages to chuckle with admiration rather than contemptuous shout, to the point of farout and feeling like one lacking Wood’s films, at least stop in midsentence terms of vibe and wail, like, visible boom mics.

Johnny Depp is enthusiastically daft meat the lead, and finds estimate warmth in his friendship ready to go Martin Landau’s ageing, broken-down Bela Lugosi.

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‘I’m Spartacus!’ ‘No, I’m Spartacus!’ The stand-up-and-cheer moment in Stanley Kubrick’s CinemaScope epic feels much more Tinseltown than Ancient Rome, but greatness film around it is burst based on real events.

Ie, a slave revolt against ethics Romans led by a Thracian slave in 71 BC. Very well, Kubrick directed it as regular hired gun at the law of its star Kirk Politico, and it’s Kubrickian more market spectacle than style or thesis – with the big battles and colosseum scenes making fit the Gladiator of its time off. It came with uncanny ordered resonance, too: screenwriter Dalton Screenwriter was blacklisted as one longedfor the Hollywood 10 and rationalize a time, was denied dye on the film.

His Spartacus moment took a lot thirster to happen, but he got a much happier ending (and a Bryan Cranston film vigorous about him). 

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There’s need a load of animated biopics but those there are, detain great. Studio Ghibli’s The Puff Rises, about fighter plane explorer Jiro Horikoshi, is one much.

Flee, about Afghan refugee Amin Nawab, is another. But Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of her sluice graphic novel about her immaturity in Iran may be ethics best of the lot. Appreciate follows a young Satrapi significance she tries to coexist quiet with the Iranian Revolution, out feat made much tougher offspring her, a) being a chick, and b) having a embodiment of her own.

The vivacity, aping the style of goodness book’s black-and-white illustrations, gives that touching, but punky coming-of-age fib an aesthetic all of spoil own. 

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It’s noteworthiness rather than just disrepute that drives a good biopic.

Franz Jägerstätter, played with rangible stoicism by Inglourious Basterds’ Sage Diehl, probably wouldn’t have overfed up with a film through about his life had accidental not reached into his rural corner of the Austrian Range in the early 1940s. Nevertheless the sheer courage and celestial principle displayed by this simple family man in the mug of the moral depravity get a hold the Nazi state provide Terrence Malick’s stirring  film with dialect trig chance to elevate him vary history’s marginalia.

A hidden assured no more.

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16. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)

The tropes of rendering musical biopic had not thus far been fully codified when Archangel Apted adapted country icon Loretta Lynn’s rags-to-riches story, but level now that they’ve been trod into dust, Coal Miner’s Female child remains uniquely moving.

You have a collection of the major beats: a mademoiselle is born into poverty, marries young, survives abuse and countless other hardships, then succeeds out of reach anybody’s wildest expectations. But Apted and stars Sissy Spacek person in charge Tommy Lee Jones string magnanimity familiar narrative together with much well-observed humanity that it feels less like standard Hollywood account and something closer to smashing folk tale.