There’s something powerful about watching a movie based on a true story. Reality can be more mind-boggling, serendipitous, inspiring, or infuriating than anything you can think up in your head—and movies based on true stories prove it. After all, the only thing that makes a crazy plot point or character even more unbelievable (but yet also believable?) is knowing you could actually meet them in your everyday life.
1. Dallas Buyers Club
Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for their parts in this biographical drama based on the true story of Ron Woodroof. Woodroof, played by Matthew, was an AIDS patient diagnosed in the mid-1980s and given a short life sentence. As part of an experiment, he set up a smuggling system to bring unapproved pharmaceutical drugs into Texas to treat himself, and soon, the Dallas Buyers Club.
2. The Imitation Game
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Alan Turing, a mathematician (can’t relate) who was enough of a genius to break the German intelligence code during WWII. The inspiring line? “Sometimes, it is the people whom no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
3.The Wolf of Wall Street
S*x, dr*gs, and corruption (not much rock ‘n’ roll here)… Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a stockbroker who goes off the rails and commits fraud after drug-soaked fraud. Also, it was the movie that broke the world record for cursing in a film.
