Best Biopics

The biopic is one of the easiest genres to do badly and one of the hardest to do well. The bad biopic is the chronological Wikipedia-summary film that hits every life milestone and respects the subject too much. The good biopic finds a structural angle on a real life that makes the life into a film — usually by focusing on a narrower span, an interior question, or a specific period of crisis rather than the full chronology.

Our picks.

The picks

• Raging Bull (1980) — Scorsese. De Niro's second Best Actor. Jake LaMotta's interior.
• Lincoln (2012) — Spielberg. Daniel Day-Lewis. The four-month period of the Thirteenth Amendment passage.
• Oppenheimer (2023) — Nolan. Cillian Murphy. Three timelines.
• The Social Network (2010) — Fincher. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay. Mark Zuckerberg.
• Capote (2005) — Bennett Miller. Philip Seymour Hoffman. The In Cold Blood years.
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — David Lean. The 70mm desert biopic.
• Schindler's List (1993) — Spielberg. Oskar Schindler. The Holocaust biopic.
• Malcolm X (1992) — Spike Lee. Denzel Washington. Three-and-a-half hours.
• 12 Years a Slave (2013) — Steve McQueen. Solomon Northup.
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) — Scorsese. The Osage Reign of Terror.
• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) — The Queen biopic that won Best Actor for Rami Malek; structurally weaker than the others on this list but commercially the most-successful.
• The Aviator (2004) — Scorsese. Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.
• Ali (2001) — Michael Mann. Will Smith. Underrated.
• Whiplash (2014) — partially — Not a strict biopic but the J.K. Simmons character is based on jazz teacher Buddy Rich.

Why narrow focus wins

The best biopics on this list almost all focus on a narrow time period in their subject's life rather than the full chronology. Lincoln is four months. Capote is roughly six years. The Social Network is two years. Oppenheimer is one ongoing security hearing intercut with backstory. Killers of the Flower Moon is about a decade.

The narrow focus is the structural advantage. The full-life biopic has to summarise; the period biopic can dramatise. A character can be developed properly across four months of screen time; across forty years, the character becomes a series of paragraphs.