They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and these crime dramas certainly prove that. Yes, some of the biggest, most acclaimed titles in the genre are actually fictionalized dramatizations of real-life crimes, from horrifyingly true serial killer sprees to shocking cases of financial fraud to deep dives into organized crime. Just as harrowing as the best true crime documentaries, these stories combine legality, morality and humanity, making for a truly chilling watch. Here is our list of 32 great films that are actually inspired by true events.
The Irishman
The ninth collaboration between actor Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese, this critically acclaimed 2019 gangster epic chronicled the life of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a truck driver turned alleged mafia hitman who became involved with the Bufalino crime family in the 1950s and later the powerful Teamster Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). The Oscar-nominated drama — which also starred Joe Pesci, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, and Harvey Keitel — is based on the 2004 nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt.
Spotlight
One of the greatest journalism movies of all time, this 2015 American drama follows The Boston Globe's "Spotlight" team, a real-life group of investigative journalists (played by Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James) who uncovered the massive scandal of child assault within the local Catholic Archdiocese. Though some creative liberties were taken in telling the story (ex: some events were depicted happening before they actually did in real life), the 2016 Best Picture winner was based on news articles published by the IRL Spotlight team.
Casino
Set in the 1970s and early '80s when Las Vegas was run by the mob, this Scorsese classic was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. Like the book, the film follows Sam "Ace" Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a low-level mobster tasked by his bosses to oversee operations at the Tangiers Casino. His job is made harder by the company he keeps, including mafia enforcer Nicky Santora (Joe Pesci) and con artist showgirl Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone).
Zodiac
Not only is Zodiac one of the best movies of the 2000s, but it's arguably one of the best cinematic thrillers of all time. And to make things even more scary, the 2007 David Fincher film is based on a true story. Yes, the Zodiac Killer was a real-life serial murderer who terrorized the Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the case continues to be one of the country's most infamous unsolved crimes. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. star in the tense mystery.
JFK
This 1991 political epic directed by Oliver Stone examines the investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner). While the president's murder was a very real and very tragic moment in American history, the film controversially delves into conspiracies surrounding JFK's death, including that Lee Harvey Oswald was a scapegoat and the shooting was part of a coup d'état to get Lyndon B. Johnson into office.
Monster
Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her transformative portrayal of Aileen Wuornos, a longtime Daytona Beach call girl who became a serial killer and murdered seven of her male clients between 1989 and 1990. The directorial debut of Patty Jenkins, the 2003 biographical drama accurately portrayed Wournos's troubled childhood and her later crimes but fictionalized certain elements of Aileen's life, including her relationship with lover Selby Wall (played by Christina Ricci).
Dog Day Afternoon
“Nobody would ever do what I did,” declared John Wojtowicz in the documentary The Dog. “That’s why they made a movie about it.” The movie he's talking about is, of course, the 1975 Sidney Lumet classic Dog Day Afternoon, which stars Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik — a man based on Wojtowicz himself — a first-time crook who leads a robbery at a Brooklyn bank, only for it to turn into a hostage situation.
The Big Short
This white-collar crime drama from Adam McKay takes viewers straight inside the corruption and greed of the 2008 U.S. financial crisis. Based on Michael Lewis's book of the same name, the film is built around an ensemble of characters — Wall Street guru Michael Burry (Christian Bale), hedge-fund specialist Mark Baum (Steve Carell), banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) — who saw the collapse of the housing market coming before anyone else did and decided to take cruel advantage of it.
Goodfellas
One of the most iconic movie characters of the '90s, Henry Hill (played by a perfect Ray Liotta) was enamored with mob life ever since he was an Italian-American kid in Brooklyn. We doubt, though, that he expected his life of crime to go quite the way it did, with addictions, prison sentences, and informing against those closest to him (Robert De Niro's Jimmy Conway, Paul Sorvino's Paul Cicero). Even more surprising, the riches-to-rags story is true: Hill was a real mobster and Goodfellas was adapted from the nonfiction book Wiseguy by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi.
Memories of Murder
An absolutely stunning mystery from director Bong Joon-ho, the 2003 neo-noir Memories of Murder is centered on a series of murders and rapes plaguing a village in rural South Korea in the 1980s, with a veteran local detective (Song Kang-ho) and a younger detective (Kim Sang-Kyung) working together to crack the case. The story was loosely based on the real-life Hwaseong serial murders, South Korea's first confirmed serial murders, which have remained unsolved for nearly forty years.
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
In this 2018 biopic on author-turned-forger Lee Israel — featuring a spectacular lead performance from Melissa McCarthy, who took over the role after Julianne Moore was fired — director Marielle Heller delves into the real-life desperation of Israel after she loses her job and is unable to get any writing published. Though she first takes to selling memorabilia and books in order to make ends meet, the scribe realizes that forging celebrity letters (Fanny Brice, Noël Coward, Dorothy Parker) is not only a lucrative business but also a viable artistic outlet for her own creativity.
Bonnie And Clyde
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were American bandits and serial killers whose crime spree during the Great Depression escalated from robbing lowly stores, gas stations and even rural funeral homes to major banks. In this 1967 classic by Arthur Penn, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty portray the title characters, whose misdeeds get even more violent and messy — especially with fellow gang members like Clyde's older brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) — as time goes on.
The Wolf Of Wall Street
The accuracy of Martin Scorsese's 2003 crime comedy has come into question in the decade since the film came out — it's based on the memoir of former stockbroker and financial criminal Jordan Belfort (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio), who weaves a tale of debauchery and fraud at a Wall Street brokerage firm in 1990s New York City. Though Belfort himself took issue with the movie's oversimplification of his own money crimes, he acknowledged that Scorsese and Co. accurately captured the "overall feeling" of those years.
Judas And The Black Messiah
With this powerful 2021 crime drama, director Shaka King and screenwriters Keith and Kenny Lucas wanted to change how the Black Panther Party is perceived. After Bill O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is offered a plea deal by the FBI, he infiltrates the Illinois chapter of the organization to gather intelligence on Chairman Fred Hampton (an Oscar-winning turn by Daniel Kaluuya). "It was quite essential to make sure that we presented the Panthers in a more realistic way and not the character that they’ve become, you know, the militant Black guys in black berets carrying guns," Keith Lucas told CinemaBlend.
Summer Of Sam
Director Spike Lee is famous for accurately capturing moments of New York City culture and history, and he definitely does that with this 1999 crime thriller, which is focused on the 1977 serial murders by David Berkowitz, a.k.a. the Son of Sam, and how the horrific crimes affected a group of fictional residents in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. The cast includes John Leguizamo, Adrien Brody, Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Esposito and Michael Badalucco, playing Berkowitz himself.
She Said
A very recent piece of American crime history, this thorough and riveting #MeToo drama trails The New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor (portrayed by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, respectively) as they work to expose the sexual abuse allegations against powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Adding a devastating extra layer of realism, the film also features some of Weinstein's real-life victims, including actress Ashley Judd, who appears as herself.
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote’s formative nonfiction novel In Cold Blood — which details the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas — has been adapted multiple times for screens big and small. However, the first was this 1967 film directed by Richard Brooks, which stars Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the infamous criminals. The "quasidocumentary" vibes were boosted by the fact that Brooks filmed where the crimes occurred, including the real Clutter home.
Catch Me If You Can
A story like Frank Abagnale Jr.'s is so wild, it can only be true: in this 2002 Steven Spielberg-directed jaunt based on Abagnale Jr.'s semi-autobiographical book of the same name, Leonardo DiCaprio — giving one of his best performances — plays the crafty teenager who performed several million dollars worth of cons, impersonating a Pan Am pilot, a Georgia doctor and a Louisiana parish prosecutor along the way. Joining DiCaprio in the Catch Me If You Can cast is Tom Hanks as Carl Hanratty, the FBI agent tailing Frank Jr., and Christopher Walken as Frank Abagnale Sr.
Lost Girls
Amy Ryan leads this heartbreaking 2020 Netflix drama as Mari Gilbert, a desperate mother who, in searching for her missing daughter Shannan (Sarah Wisser), launches an investigation that leads police to the unsolved murders of young sex workers on the South Shore barrier islands of Long Island, spanning from the early '90s to the 2010s. The case of the Gilgo Beach serial killer made headlines in 2023 when a suspect was charged with the murders of six of the women.
Till
After the brutal, racially charged murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett Till in August 1955, Mamie Till-Bradley dedicated her life to the relentless pursuit of justice for her son's death, famously insisting on an open casket funeral for her son to reveal what had been done to him. This 2022 biographical drama is a worthy memorial to the young man, with Danielle Deadwyler starring as Till's mother, who became an icon of the American Civil Rights Movement for her work in education and racial justice.
Hustlers
In a role that many believed would nab Jennifer Lopez an Oscar nomination, the triple threat portrayed veteran stripper Ramona Vega in the Lorene Scafaria-directed dramedy Hustlers. Vega leads a group of New York City pole dancers who begin to steal money by drugging stock traders and CEOs who visit their club, and then run up their credit cards. Though the heist is inspired by true events, there were big differences between the movie and the real story, so much so that Samantha Barbash — the danger who inspired Lopez's character — sued producers for $40 million. (That defamation suit was dismissed.)
The Trial Of The Chicago 7
A courtroom masterpiece from Aaron Sorkin, this 2020 legal drama is based on the infamous 1969 trial of a group of anti–Vietnam War protesters — played by an A+ ensemble cast that includes Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Jeremy Strong, and John Carroll Lynch — who were charged by the federal government with conspiracy and more, arising from the countercultural protests in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Richard Jewell
Just one of many Clint Eastwood movies based on a true story, this 2019 bio-drama depicts the 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia, and its aftermath, told from the perspective of the security guard, Richard Jewell (played by Paul Hauser), who first discovered the explosive device. Though initially hailed a hero for alerting authorities and saving the lives of countless spectators, Jewell was later wrongly suspected by the FBI of having planted the device himself, an investigation that was even bigger than the movie showed.
House Of Gucci
Based on Sara Gay Forden's 2001 book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, this 2021 Ridley Scott flick certainly offers all of that, with Lady Gaga scoring a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Patrizia Reggiani, the Italian socialite who was convicted in a highly publicized trial of hiring a hitman to kill her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci. And, yes, we're talking about that Gucci, which means that the onscreen fashions are as unforgettable as the story itself.
Psycho
Yes, the Hitchcock horror classic — which gave cinema the most iconic shower scene of all time —is actually inspired by a true story. Adapted from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel of the same name, the story of shy motel caretaker Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) and his domineering mother was loosely based on the case of convicted Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein who, like Bates, was a solitary murderer living in rural isolation, was raised by an overbearing mother, and dressed in women's clothes to impersonate their deceased parent.
Natural Born Killers
This romantic crime film — directed by Oliver Stone, with a story by Quentin Tarantino and a cast led by Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson in one of his best roles — sparked a bit of irony when it was released in 1994. Natural Born Killers was loosely based on the true crimes of Caril Ann Fugate and Charles Starkweather, a young Nebraska couple who went on a killing spree throughout the Midwest in 1958.
Heavenly Creatures
Starring Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in, astonishingly, their feature film debuts, this critically acclaimed 1994 drama from Peter Jackson is based on the notorious Parker–Hulme murder case. It tells the true story of Pauline Rieper (Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Winslet), two outcast girls growing up in 1950s New Zealand, whose intense relationship culminates in the premeditated killing of Parker's mother.
Foxcatcher
Steve Carell chillingly transformed himself to play John du Pont, the multi-millionaire heir turned murderer at the center of Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. A wrestling enthusiast, Du Pont recruits two Olympic gold medalists Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) and his older brother David (Mark Ruffalo) to coach wrestlers to the top of those podiums. One of those brothers would end up the victim of Du Pont's gun, making John to this day the only member of the Forbes 400 richest Americans to be convicted of murder.
BlacKkKlansman
Loosely based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth, the '70s-set Spike Lee drama follows the first Black detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department as he sets out to infiltrate and expose the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. With John David Washington as Stallworth (the actor even got to meet the real man during filming), the cast also includes Topher Grace as KKK grand wizard David Duke, Corey Hawkins as civil rights leader Kwame Ture and Adam Driver as Stallworth's fictional partner, Detective Flip Zimmerman.
Molly's Game
Molly Bloom's 2014 memoir — in which she recounts the true story of how she went from being a U.S. competitive skier to running an illegal, underground poker empire for Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and even the Russian mob — was adapted by Aaron Sorkin for his directorial debut, with Jessica Chastain portraying Bloom. Though Sorkin was reportedly reticent to call the film a "poker movie," the drama does up the realism by featuring many scenes of actual gambling from the film's extras, who were all professional poker players.
Party Monster
Set in the Club Kids party scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s in New York City, Party Monster tells the shocking story of Michael Alig (played by Macaulay Culkin), the infamous party promoter who was convicted of felony manslaughter after killing his fellow clubgoer Andre "Angel" Melendez in a confrontation over a drug debt. The film is based on Disco Bloodbath, the memoir of Alig's former friend James St. James, portrayed in the film by Seth Green.
Serpico
Garnering Al Pacino's first Best Actor Oscar nomination, Serpico sees the iconic actor as the titular character, Frank Serpico, an idealistic New York City detective who struggles with the corruption found within the New York City Police Department. As in real life, Serpico's work as a whistleblower against the police force led to a governmental investigation by the Knapp Commission and later earned the officer the NYPD Medal of Honor.
