Best Movies Based On A True Story

The true story of teen surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack and courageously overcame all odds to become a champion again, through her sheer determination and unwavering faith.

Harvard graduate James Averill is the sheriff of prosperous Jackson County, Wyo., when a battle erupts between the area's poverty-stricken immigrants and its wealthy cattle farmers. The politically connected ranch owners fight the immigrants with the help of Nathan Champion, a mercenary competing with Averill for the love of local madam Ella Watson. As the struggle escalates, Averill and Champion begin to question their decisions.

This film is a glimpse into the life, love and the unconquerable spirit of the legendary Bruce Lee. From a childhood of rigorous martial arts training, Lee realizes his dream of opening his own kung-fu school in America. Before long, he is discovered by a Hollywood producer and begins a meteoric rise to fame and an all too short reign as one the most charismatic action heroes in cinema history.

Inspired by actual events, a group of fame-obsessed teenagers use the Internet to track the whereabouts of famous celebrities, then rob their homes of riches.

The fight for kids begins now. Inspired by the powerful true story, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot, follows Donna and Reverend Martin as they ignite a fire in the hearts of their rural church to embrace kids in the foster system that nobody else would take. By doing the impossible–adopting 77 children–this East Texas community proved that, with real, determined love, the battle for America’s most vulnerable can be won.

In the late 1960s, the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson stops touring, produces "Pet Sounds" and begins to lose his grip on reality. By the 1980s, under the sway of a controlling therapist, he finds a savior in Melinda Ledbetter.

In 2002, cable news producer Kim Barker decides to shake up her routine by taking a daring new assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan. Dislodged from her comfortable American lifestyle, Barker finds herself in the middle of an out-of-control war zone. Luckily, she meets Tanya Vanderpoel, a fellow journalist who takes the shell-shocked reporter under her wing. Amid the militants, warlords and nighttime partying, Barker discovers the key to becoming a successful correspondent.

Lilja lives in poverty and dreams of a better life. Her mother moves to the United States and abandons her to her aunt, who neglects her. Lilja hangs out with her friends, Natasha and Volodya, who is suicidal. Desperate for money, she starts working as a prostitute, and later meets Andrei. He offers her a good job in Sweden, but when Lilja arrives her life quickly enters a downward spiral.

The TRUE, extraordinary and chilling story of career conman Robert Freegard who masqueraded as an MI5 agent and fooled people into going into hiding, and the woman who fell for him, and then brought him down.

May, 1980. Man-seob is a taxi driver in Seoul who lives from hand to mouth, raising his young daughter alone. One day, he hears that there is a foreigner who will pay big money for a drive down to Gwangju city. Not knowing that he’s a German journalist with a hidden agenda, Man-seob takes the job.

A Salem resident attempts to frame her ex-lover's wife for being a witch in the middle of the 1692 witchcraft trials.

At the end of World War II, a German soldier is looking for his daughter while an SS troop is looking for a Jewish treasure.

The story of a teenager, Richard Wershe Jr., who became an undercover informant for the police during the 1980s and was ultimately arrested for drug-trafficking and sentenced to life in prison.

Italian American crime bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello run their respective families during the 20th century. In 1957, Genovese tried (and failed) to assassinate Costello, who was ultimately injured and attempted to retire from the mafia.

When the tenacious young sailor Jessica Watson sets out to be the youngest person to sail solo, nonstop and unassisted around the world, many expect her to fail. With the support of her sailing coach and mentor Ben Bryant and her parents, Jessica is determined to accomplish what was thought to be impossible, navigating some of the world’s most challenging stretches of ocean over the course of 210 days.

One woman's journey for self-discovery and turns into a harrowing tale of survival.

The untold true story set in the winter of 1925 that takes you across the treacherous terrain of the Alaskan tundra for an exhilarating and uplifting adventure that will test the strength, courage and determination of one man, Leonhard Seppala, and his lead sled dog, Togo.

Young lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg teams with her husband Marty to bring a groundbreaking case before the U.S. Court of Appeals and overturn a century of sex discrimination.

Failed college coach Norman Dale gets a chance at redemption when he is hired to coach a high school basketball team in a tiny Indiana town. After a teacher persuades star player Jimmy Chitwood to quit and focus on his long-neglected studies, Dale struggles to develop a winning team in the face of community criticism for his temper and his unconventional choice of assistant coach: Shooter, a notorious alcoholic.

Ari Ben Canaan, a passionate member of the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah, attempts to transport 600 Jewish refugees on a dangerous voyage from Cyprus to Palestine on a ship named the Exodus. He faces obstruction from British forces, who will not grant the ship passage to its destination.

Carla Moran, a hard-working single mother, is raped in her bedroom by someone — or something — that she cannot see. Despite skeptical psychiatrists, she is repeatedly attacked by this invisible force. Could this be a case of hysteria or something more horrific?

From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use.

From the 1960's to the 1980's, evangelist Jim Baker and his ambitious wife, Tammy Faye, rose from humble beginnings to to build an empire based on big-time evangelical Christianity--only for the couple to fall from grace because of some all-too-human sins.

The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962—the nuclear standoff with the USSR sparked by the discovery by the Americans of missile bases established on the Soviet-allied island of Cuba.

An American woman, trapped in Islamic Iran by her brutish husband, must find a way to escape with her daughter as well.

Henry II and his estranged queen battle over the choice of an heir.

In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words use by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.

An international assassin known as ‘The Jackal’ is employed by disgruntled French generals to kill President Charles de Gaulle, with a dedicated gendarme on the assassin’s trail.

The 47-year old Al Capone, after 10 years in prison, starts suffering from dementia and comes to be haunted by his violent past.

Professor James Murray begins work compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, Dr. William Minor.

Six actors portray six personas of music legend Bob Dylan in scenes depicting various stages of his life, chronicling his rise from unknown folksinger to international icon and revealing how Dylan constantly reinvented himself.

Dangal is an extraordinary true story based on the life of Mahavir Singh and his two daughters, Geeta and Babita Phogat. The film traces the inspirational journey of a father who trains his daughters to become world class wrestlers.

Bill O'Neal infiltrates the Black Panthers on the orders of FBI Agent Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover. As Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton ascends—falling for a fellow revolutionary en route—a battle wages for O’Neal’s soul.

A victim of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 helps the police track down the killers while struggling to recover from devastating trauma.

Roxana Aubrey decides to drop her studies and escape her life in Paris for a free diving course in the south of France. She is quickly pulled into a life that reaches new depths brought by the weight of an ocean's descent.

Kenny Wells, a modern-day prospector, hustler, and dreamer, is desperate for a lucky break. Left with few options, Wells teams up with an equally luckless geologist to execute a grandiose, last-ditch effort: to find gold deep in the uncharted jungle of Indonesia.

A hardcore US racist skinhead who, because of his intelligence, leads a gang dedicated to fighting the enemy: the supposed American-Jewish conspiracy for domination. However, he's hiding a secret: he's Jewish-born, a brilliant scholar whose questioning of the tenets of his faith has left him angry and confused, turning against those who he thinks have a tragic history of their own making.

Warren Stacy, an office equipment repairman, begins murdering women after they reject his advances. To minimize the evidence, Stacy always kills while naked, wearing nothing but gloves, and further evades the law with his strong alibis. Veteran detective Leo Kessler is convinced of Stacy's guilt and begins using questionable methods to catch him.

Two years after a Super Bowl win when NFL head coach Sean Payton is suspended, he goes back to his hometown and finds himself reconnecting with his 12-year-old son by coaching his Pop Warner football team.

In 1940s Los Angeles, two former boxers-turned-cops must grapple with corruption, narcissism, stag films and family madness as they pursue the killer of an aspiring young actress.

Tired of the noise and madness of New York and the crushing conventions of late Eisenhower-era America, itinerant journalist Paul Kemp travels to the pristine island of Puerto Rico to write for a local San Juan newspaper run by the downtrodden editor Lotterman. Adopting the rum-soaked lifestyle of the late ‘50s version of Hemingway’s 'The Lost Generation', Paul soon becomes entangled with a very attractive American woman and her fiancée, a businessman involved in shady property development deals.  It is within this world that Kemp ultimately discovers his true voice as a writer and integrity as a man.

When a son and mother move to Seattle in hopes for a better life, the mother meets a seemingly polite man. Things go south when the man turns out to be abusive, endangering their lives. As the mother struggles to maintain hope in an impossible situation, the son has plans to escape.

Three fanatical bird-watchers spend an entire year competing to spot the highest number of species as El Nino sends an extraordinary variety of rare breeds flying up into the U.S., but they quickly discover that there are more important things than coming out on top of the competition.

After the tragic death of star volleyball player Caroline "Line" Found, a team of dispirited high school girls must band together under the guidance of their tough-love coach in hopes of winning the state championship!

The story of the life of Domino Harvey, who abandoned her career as a Ford model to become a bounty hunter.

Based on the story of Jesse Owens, the athlete whose quest to become the greatest track and field athlete in history thrusts him onto the world stage of the 1936 Olympics, where he faces off against Adolf Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy.

From his birth in Bethlehem to his death and eventual resurrection, the life of Jesus Christ is given the all-star treatment in this epic retelling. Major aspects of Christ's life are touched upon, including the execution of all the newborn males in Egypt by King Herod; Christ's baptism by John the Baptist; and the betrayal by Judas after the Last Supper that eventually leads to Christ's crucifixion and miraculous return.

A young female embezzler arrives at the Bates Motel, which has terrible secrets of its own. Although this version is in color, features a different cast, and is set in 1998, it is closer to a shot-for-shot remake than most remakes, Gus Van Sant often copying Hitchcock's camera movements and editing, and Joseph Stefano's script is mostly carried over. Bernard Herrmann's musical score is reused as well, though with a new arrangement by Danny Elfman and recorded in stereo.

Gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin helps Martin Luther King Jr. and others organize the 1963 March on Washington.

A look at the life of Cecil Gaines who served eight presidents as the White House's head butler from 1952 to 1986, and had a unique front-row seat as political and racial history was made.