The biopic is a peculiar beast: the closer you look at the genre, the less it seems like a genre at all. Of course there’s an instantly recognisable formula to many of them – the hybrid of melodrama and history lesson which came to dominate middlebrow filmmaking in the 2000s and 2010s. But what’s striking about this template is how little the best examples of the form have to do with it.
Take , the 2014 film starring , and ’s . While each tells the story of a great 20th century scientific thinker, only the former, with its heavily spotlit central performance, Wikipedian structure and inoffensively pretty aesthetic belongs in the same drawer as Trumbo, , and . ’s film, meanwhile, would splinter any drawer you tried to cram it in: part of what makes Oppenheimer so exhilarating is the extent to which everything it does feels indivisible from everything it’s about.
Hence the extremely varied list of films below. Truly great biopics can be made in any style going, from musical to western; they can slavishly cleave to the facts or capture their subject more impressionistically, with all the slants and ambiguities that film allows. To select the best 40, I set just three ground rules.
One: the films should be thought of first and foremost as accounts of an actual person’s life and work, so no veiled portrayals like , or alternate histories like . Two: their chief focus should be one or two specific individuals, rather than broader historical moments (sorry, ). And thre.