Films about real lives, reviewed by a ghostwriter who tells real life stories for a living. The best biopics shape truth without betraying it, and these reviews watch for exactly that line.
BiopicJudy (2019) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Renee Zellweger won Best Actress for a technically accomplished transformation inside a film that exists to contain it, covering Judy Garland's five-week London run five months before her death.
BiopicThe King's Speech (2010) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A well-made two-hander about a man with a stammer and the unqualified Australian who treated him, which beat The Social Network for Best Picture and Best Director…
BiopicThe Blind Side (2009) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A competently made film in which a wealthy white family takes in a homeless Black teenager, told almost entirely from the family's position, and Sandra Bullock won…
BiopicErin Brockovich (2000) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Soderbergh made a genuinely good film about a paralegal assembling six hundred plaintiffs against a utility company, and Julia Roberts won Best Actress over Ellen Burstyn in Requiem…
BiopicVice (2018) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Christian Bale gained around forty-five pounds and disappeared into Dick Cheney, in a film whose formal tricks keep interrupting a genuinely serious subject. Bale lost Best Actor to Rami…
BiopicThe Insider (1999) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Michael Mann made a two-and-a-half-hour thriller about a man giving a television interview, in which the entire plot is legal procedure and corporate liability, and it is one…
BiopicExtremely Wicked (2019) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about Ted Bundy told from his girlfriend's perspective, which is a genuinely good idea, executed by a picture that keeps forgetting she is the protagonist and…
BiopicElvis (2022) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Austin Butler is genuinely extraordinary and the film around him is narrated by his manager, edited at about four cuts a second for the first hour, and structured as…
BiopicThe Dahmer - Monster opener rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It is well made, Evan Peters is excellent, and it dramatizes the deaths of identifiable people whose families objected publicly and were not consulted. The craft…
BiopicMonster (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Charlize Theron gained weight, wore prosthetic teeth and won an Academy Award, and the performance underneath all of that is better than the transformation it became famous for. The…
BiopicThe Motorcycle Diaries (2004) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two medical students ride a failing motorcycle across South America in 1952 and one of them becomes Che Guevara afterward. The film's discipline is that it stops…
AdventureInto the Wild (2007) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Sean Penn adapts Krakauer's account of Chris McCandless walking into Alaska and dying there, and the film admires him considerably more than the book does. Hal Holbrook…
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