The Best Movies Based on True Stories in 2019 – Esquire

This year’s answer to Bohemian Rhapsody is Rocketman—which, luckily for everyone, is a far better film. It tells the story of Elton John’s life from his childhood in Middlesex, to record-setting pop music success, marriage, rocky relationships, and struggles with addiction. Starring Kingsman‘s Taron Egerton as the bespectacled singer, the film isn’t just a biopic, but a true, unexplained-song-and-dance-filled musical packed with authentically Eltonian showstoppers.

Lots of families have a business, say, Mom’s dentistry practice or Grandpa’s hardware store. Britain’s knight family are in a pretty unique field, however—they’re all professional wrestlers. Written and directed by The Office’s Stephen Merchant and produced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Fighting with My Family stars Midsommar’s Florence Pugh as real life WWE-star Paige, and chronicles her rise from a working-class wrestling clan. Game of Thrones’s Lena Headey and Shaun of the Dead’s Nick Frost co-star as her parents, Julia “Sweet Saraya” Knight and Patrick “Rowdy Ricky” Knight, and The Rock’s there, too—playing himself, of course.

When filmmaker Lulu Wang’s grandmother was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer, her family decided to spare the elderly lady the pain and suffering that would come with the knowledge of her impending fate. So, against Wang’s misgivings, they kept Grandma in the dark about her illness and faked a sham wedding in order to gather in China to say their goodbyes without raising suspicions. Wang told the story in a 2016 episode of This American Life, and with The Farewell she’s adapted the tender story of culture- and continent-spanning family dynamics into a feature film, starring film Crazy Rich Asians’s Awkwafina in the lead role.

Britain knows its way around a bleak cinematic portrait of working-class life, and Ray & Liz marks the newest entry to that great and grim tradition. Photographer Richard Billingham gained acclaim in the late ’90s for his stark portraits of his chain-smoking mother, Liz, and alcoholic father, Ray. Their desperate, constrained lives are the subject of his first feature film, which pairs scenes from his neglectful, deeply impoverished childhood with depictions of his parents in their older years.

In Texas in 1991, three little girls died in a house fire. Their father, 23-year-old Cameron Todd Willingham, an unemployed mechanic, was convicted of setting the fire and murdering his daughters, and sentenced to die. He was executed in 2004, but the case would earn national recognition five years later thanks to an article in The New Yorker by writer David Grann. The piece revealed that Willingham’s conviction was based on junk arson science and a jailhouse informant who later recanted. The film, which takes its title from the name of Grann’s article, stars Unbroken’s Jack O’Connell as Willingham, and the always wonderful Laura Dern as playwright Elizabeth Gilbert, who became one of the condemned men’s staunchest defenders.

“Stockholm syndrome,” the phenomenon in which some kidnapped people can grow to identify with their abductors, is probably one of the most famous psychological terms. But the events that gave it its name aren’t as well known. In 1973, armed robbers took hostages during a botched bank heist in Stockholm, Sweden. During the course of the standoff with police, the four bank employees held hostage began to feel more aligned with their captors than with the authorities working to rescue them—and after the siege ended, one employee would even have a romantic relationship with one of the gunmen. The film stars Ethan Hawke and Mark Strong as the triggermen, with Noomi Rapace playing a bank employee.

In 2008, terrorists attacked Mumbai in 12 assaults over the course of four days, leaving 163 people dead and more than 300 injured. One of the sites targeted was the city’s iconic luxury hotel, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which was seized by gunmen. This film, which stars Dev Patel as a Taj waiter and Armie Hammer as an American guest, takes place during the siege and tells the story of the hotel guests’ and staff’s fight for survival.