25 Best Biopics Ever

25. WALK THE LINE (2005) SUBJECT: Johnny Cash

From his signature opening line (''Hello, I'm Johnny Cash'') at concerts to his iconic black attire, Cash lived life with style. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter was constantly in the public eye, whether it was for his drug use or his advocacy of prison reform. James Mangold's take on the Cash legend delves deep into the ups and downs of his rise to fame, and Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon's harmonious covers of Cash's tunes are worth the price of admission alone. — Saba Mohtasham

24. YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939) SUBJECT: Abraham Lincoln

A great American playing a great American, Henry Fonda sees beyond the reverent aura surrounding Abraham Lincoln to find the real human being underneath. It helps that John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln only focuses on Lincoln's early law career — specifically, as he defends two men accused of murder from a lynching-happy community — in Springfield, IL in the 1830s. Fonda's Lincoln is slightly unformed, clearly possessing the potential for greatness, but not yet the legend who would be enshrined in marble. — Christian Blauvelt

23. ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000) SUBJECT: Erin Brockovich

As a lowly assistant at a California law firm in the 1990s, Brockovich investigated an environmentally neglectful power company and ultimately won a $333 million class action settlement. Under the direction of Steven Soderbergh, Julia Roberts has great fun playing the sassy single mom who knows the key to getting men to help her: ''They're called boobs.'' — Jeff Labrecque

22. RAY (2004) SUBJECT: Ray Charles

Jamie Foxx won a well-deserved Oscar for playing the pioneer who powered through physical limitations and crippling addictions to invent the music that we'd call soul. Taylor Hackford's film manages to be honest about both Brother Ray's genius and his demons, while also taking us on a grand tour of some of the 20th century's greatest music. — Marc Bernardin

21. COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER (1980) SUBJECT: Loretta Lynn

Married at 14, a mother of four by 18, Loretta Lynn's journey was infinitely longer than the 300 miles from Kentucky poverty to the Grand Ole Opry. Like Lynn, Sissy Spacek is perfectly sweet but sturdy, and her up-and-down marriage forms the backbone of the film. —Jeff Labrecque

20. THE LAST EMPEROR (1987) SUBJECT: Pu Yi

An achingly beautiful epic from Italian maestro Bernardo Bertolucci, and the first film to ever be shot in Beijing's Forbidden City, The Last Emperor encompasses the life of Pu Yi, who became Emperor of China 100 years ago at the age of two and abdicated at six. John Lone sensitively portrays Pu Yi's adult years, when the Japanese installed him as the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo in 1932, through his post-war internment and eventual life as a Beijing gardener. — Christian Blauvelt

Warren Beatty

Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Beatty's directing debut was this sparkling romantic comedy, a remake of 1941's Here Comes Mr. Jordan, in which Beatty also stars as Joe Pendleton, a jock who is spirited to Heaven due to a celestial snafu and is forced to return to Earth in the body of a doomed tycoon.

Reds (1981)
Beatty won a directing Oscar for this biopic, an epic like no other. The story of American journalist John Reed (Beatty), who enthusiastically reported on the Russian Revolution, only to become disillusioned by the Soviet government's totalitarianism, is interspersed with talking-head testimony from real-life witnesses to the events of the film.

Bulworth (1998)
Beatty's corrosive satire about the sclerotic cynicism of Washington politics didn't find an audience — maybe because politically-minded moviegoers were preoccupied with the stranger-than-fiction Lewinsky scandal, or because they didn't get Beatty's character, a senator who suddenly starts speaking in awkward, hip-hop rhymes. —Gary Susman

18. HOTEL RWANDA (2004) SUBJECT: Paul Rusesabagina

Maybe it's an overly sanitized depiction of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda — and maybe it arrived 10 years too late — but Terry George's Hotel Rwanda was still a wake-up call to an American public that knew little about the events it depicts, even when they were happening. Don Cheadle plays savvy hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan Oskar Schindler who in real life sheltered 1,268 Tutsis from the Hutu militias who killed over 800,000 people. — Christian Blauvelt

17. SILKWOOD (1983) SUBJECT: Karen Silkwood

Karen Silkwood was a chemical technician at an Oklahoma nuclear plant in the 1970s. After she tested positive for plutonium contamination, Silkwood was ready to publicly discuss the many safety violations she witnessed at the plant. Yet, while on her way to meet with a reporter, Silkwood died in an unexplained car accident. Mike Nichols' film is admirable for not reducing her story to a mere good guy/bad guy conflict, and it benefits from a predictably sturdy performance by Meryl Streep. — John Young

16. LA VIE EN ROSE (2007) SUBJECT: Edith Piaf

Perhaps the most popular French singer of the 20th century, Piaf is best known for the songs ''La vie en rose'' and ''Non, je ne regrette rien.'' Although her life included numerous hardships — four years of childhood blindness, the death of lover Marcel Cerdan, and an extended addiction to morphine — Piaf cherished performing on stage, and Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard was miraculously able to channel that artistic fervor. — John Young

15. ED WOOD (1994) SUBJECT: Ed Wood

Sixteen years after his death, the hack behind Hollywood's most infamous debacle (Plan 9 From Outer Space) finally achieved the stardom he'd always craved. Johnny Depp captures the cross-dressing director's irrepressible optimism as he labors to fulfill cinematic dreams for his circle of Hollywood oddballs. — Jeff Labrecque

14. PERSEPOLIS (2007) SUBJECT: Marjane Satrapi

Adapting her own graphic-novel memoir (with codirector Vincent Paronnaud), Satrapi tells of growing up a teen rebel in repressive Iran, loving Iron Maiden as war raged between Iran and Iraq; becoming a woman in Vienna, while shedding her Iranian identity in favor of European disaffection; and returning home to an even more totalitarian Tehran and a harrowing bout of depression. Most of this is presented in lush black-and-white animation that shifts and flows and swirls together with the seamless, inexorable pull of memory. —Marc Bernardin

13. MILK (2008) SUBJECT: Harvey Milk

A fixture of 1970s San Francisco politics, Milk was assassinated in 1978, less than a year after winning a seat on the city's board of supervisors as the first openly gay man elected to major office in the U.S. Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, though, wisely and poignantly focus on Milk's life, on his uncanny ability to make politics personal and the personal political. Aided by Sean Penn's transformative performance, the film delivers a remarkably timed homily on the vital importance of community organizers. —Adam B. Vary

12. MONSTER (2003) SUBJECT: Aileen Wuornos

Charlize Theron just about disappears into Wuornos, a prostitute who murdered seven men — who she alleged tried to rape her — over 12 months in 1989 and 1990. The actress gained weight and went through extensive makeup for the Oscar-winning role, but Theron's real feat was capturing Wuornos' damaged rootlessness, communicating a lifetime of abuse and rage in a burning blink of her eyes. —Adam B. Vary

11. THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980) SUBJECT: Joseph Merrick

Some critics have unfairly dismissed The Elephant Man as one of David Lynch's more conventional films. Maybe it is. But if Lynch trades in some of his usual obsessions, it's because the story of Joseph Merrick (called ''John Merrick'' in the film), the famously deformed Englishman relegated to living in a 19th century London freak show, is so affecting on its own. And who else could have rendered Merrick's sad end with such a sublime mix of heartbreak and transcendence as Lynch? —Christian Blauvelt

10. AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003) SUBJECT: Harvey Pekar

The Cleveland cartoonist who famously chronicled his bout with cancer actually makes a cameo as himself in this surreal portrait of the artist. But it is Paul Giamatti's cantankerous turn as the uncompromising schlub who eventually finds contentment, despite himself, that reveals the teddy bear beneath the scowl. —Jeff Labrecque

9. MALCOLM X (1992) SUBJECT: Malcolm X

Spike Lee put every ounce of himself into telling the story of Malcolm Little, a two-bit hustler who would become the Islamic counter-point to Martin Luther King. As the civil rights firebrand, Denzel Washington expertly holds the center of one of Lee's finest films. —Marc Bernardin

8. CAPOTE (2005) SUBJECT: Truman Capote

Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman) was first famous for writing Breakfast at Tiffany's, and later infamous for his drug addled downward spiral in New York high society. But this film chooses instead to tell the pivotal story of his life: the period from 1959 to 1965 when he researched and wrote the tale of two lowlife criminals who brutally murdered an entire family in a small Kansas town. The resulting book, In Cold Blood, was a seminal triumph, but as the movie makes clear, it was also its author's undoing. —Adam B. Vary

7. MY LEFT FOOT: THE STORY OF CHRISTY BROWN (1989) SUBJECT: Christy Brown

Born with severe cerebral palsy, Irish author and artist Christy Brown proved he didn't need a voice to speak to the world. With only control of his left foot, Brown turned this impediment into a skill and became one of Ireland's leading intellectuals. Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker's heartfelt representations as Christy and his mother, respectively, leaves viewers with no doubt that anything is possible. — Saba Mohtasham

6. ELIZABETH (1998) SUBJECT: Queen Elizabeth I

Elizabeth's 44-year reign as Queen of England saw the reestablishment of the Church of England, the debut of many of Shakespeare's most acclaimed plays, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film, however, focuses on the initial years of Elizabeth's rule, as the queen struggled to form her public identity. At times edited as rapidly as a music video, Elizabeth crackles with energy, and Cate Blanchett's commanding presence as ''The Virgin Queen'' is nothing but divine. —John Young

5. SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993) SUBJECT: Oskar Schindler

A German war profiteer savvy enough to realize Jewish labor would come dirt cheap during WWII, Schindler (Liam Neeson) only gradually realizes that he simply must use his pull with high placed Nazi officers to save those workers from the death camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust. Shot in stark black-and-white, and staged with haunting verisimilitude, director Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winner uses this one man's uplifting tale to make terribly plain the uncompromising brutality of this period in history. —Adam B. Vary

4. GOODFELLAS (1990) SUBJECT: Henry Hill

In GoodFellas, the tale of real-life mobster Henry Hill, Scorsese perfects his knack for neither condemning nor glamorizing his characters. Drawing upon Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, Scorsese presents the life of a gangster from the inside-out, as he shows Hill's start as a kid selling cigarettes on the street to his eventual middle-age unraveling in the drug trade. At the end, when Hill finds himself living a humdrum suburban life in the federal witness protection program, it doesn't feel so much a judgment as a bitter irony. — Christian Blauvelt

3. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) SUBJECT: T.E. Lawrence

Director David Lean follows Lawrence (Peter O'Toole in a star-making performance) from a nobody British intelligence officer into the larger-than-life figure who successfully leads the fractured tribes of Arabia against the Turks in WWI. For many in Hollywood — including Steven Spielberg — Lawrence of Arabia remains the gold standard for how to compact a great man's life into the confines of a feature-length film, but it's also required viewing for anyone wishing to further understand how the Middle East got to be the way it is today. —Adam B. Vary

2. AMADEUS (1984) SUBJECT: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Amadeus, adapted by Milos Forman with a hippie-ish flair from Peter Shaffer's original play, succeeds because it's not merely a linear biography celebrating Mozart's brilliance. It's about the timeless jealousy of Antonio Salieri, the court composer for Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who both hated his rival from Salzburg?and profoundly loved his music. Salieri can appreciate Mozart's achievements like no one else, because he knows that he'll never share Mozart's talent. —Christian Blauvelt

1. RAGING BULL (1980) SUBJECT: Jake La Motta

Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta, the middleweight boxing champion of the 1940s and '50s, is the quintessential Martin Scorsese male, an isolated figure racked with guilt, sexual insecurity, and an inability to relate to women. De Niro's weight gain (and loss) for the role has been justly praised, but it's the way Scorsese gets inside LaMotta's head, with slow-motion point-of-view shots and a disorienting soundtrack (the ringside crowd noises were mixed together with animal cries) that makes this critique of aggressive masculinity so devastating — and human. —Christian Blauvelt