The Best Biopics, Definitively Ranked

The best biopics ever made, like the worst, face a simple enough task: tell us the true-ish story of someone’s life. But that simplicity and accountability to fact—while recognizing that sometimes, you just can’t let the full truth get in the way of a good movie—has both inspired and confounded some of the great directors of our time.

The genre has given us the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, in the conversation for greatest film ever made, and some of the best performances in cinema…