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The 25 Best Biopics of All Time, Ranked
Biopics are the tomatoes of cinema. Whether one calls them bio-pics or bi-opics, they’re a staple of every awards show. Actors with Oscars in their eyes don gobs of make-up, wigs, fatsuits, and fake accents in service of juicy roles that often define their careers. Or, in Faye Dunaway’s case, ruin them. The path of the biopic is a tricky one, though, since they can be as formulaic as a 1940s’ western. For all the spinning newspapers and trips to rehab,…
This list features biopics that have the genre formula down to a T and others that truly defy convention. There are Oscar winners and nominees galore, and a handful of Meryl Streep movies to keep readers satisfied. Criteria for the poll defined a biopic as the dramatization of the life of one or two people. This means that spoofs, faux biopics, or films that draw loose inspiration from figures without overtly referencing them, and therefore films like Walk Hard, Zelig, or The Devil Wears Prada, were ineligible, as were films that focused more an historical event than the person at its centre. (ie: Malcolm X and Ali are biopics, but One Night in Miami is not.) In cases in which a curious choice received multiple votes, however, we generally let it slide.
Here are That Shelf’s picks for the 25 best biopics of all time: