Six sliders. No stars.
Nothing on this site is recommended because people liked it. Films are described by what they are (how heavy, how fast, how far from the real world), and you get the ones closest to what you asked for.
Neither of these is the better film. They are just at opposite ends.
84 films tagged true story, showing 50
Move a slider to sort by what films are like.
2010 · Drama
A Harvard undergraduate builds a website that spreads from campus to campus, and is sued by the friend who funded it and by classmates who say he took their idea. Told through the two depositions, with a great deal of fast talking.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · Drama
Three Black women working as mathematicians at NASA in the early 1960s do the sums that put an astronaut in orbit, in a building that is still segregated. Their fight is mostly a bureaucratic one.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Drama
The Boston Globe's investigations desk works a story about abuse in the Catholic church, and keeps finding it is bigger than the last version of it. Mostly documents, doorsteps and phone calls.
AI estimate, not yet described
1995 · Drama
An oxygen tank blows two days into a moon landing, and the mission becomes getting three men home in a crippled ship. Half the film is engineers at desks.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Drama
The physicist who ran the Manhattan Project builds the bomb, then spends years in rooms answering for it. Three hours, mostly of men talking, cut between two timelines.
AI estimate, not yet described
2013 · Drama
A free Black musician living in New York in 1841 is drugged, kidnapped and sold to a plantation in Louisiana. It moves slowly and stays with the worst of it rather than cutting away.
AI estimate, not yet described
2006 · Action
Three hundred Spartan soldiers march out to hold a narrow coastal pass against a Persian army many times their size. It is one fight after another, shot in slow motion, with a narrator carrying you between them.
AI estimate, not yet described
2024 · Drama
A nineteen-year-old with a guitar arrives in New York in 1961 and talks his way into the folk clubs of Greenwich Village. Songs played end to end, and a lot of people arguing about them.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2017 · Drama
A Seoul cabbie takes a big fare to drive a German reporter down to Gwangju in May 1980, with no idea what is happening in the city. It starts as a comedy about a man chasing money and does not stay one.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Drama
In 1984 Nike's basketball arm is broke and running third behind Adidas and Converse, and one scout wants to spend the whole budget on a single rookie. Men in offices and on the phone, talking fast.
AI estimate, not yet described
2012 · Thriller
With six US diplomats hiding in Tehran in 1979, a CIA man proposes to walk them out as the crew of a fake science fiction film. Half Hollywood comedy, half thriller that keeps tightening.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2017 · Comedy
In 1973 the top woman in tennis agrees to a televised match against a loud former champion who says no woman can beat him. Half of it is the circus, half is her private life.
AI estimate, not yet described
2021 · Drama
A nine-year-old boy's street in 1969 Belfast turns overnight into a place with barricades, and his parents have to decide whether to stay. Black and white, shot at kid height, and mostly family talk.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Crime
A Boston gangster becomes an FBI informant and uses the arrangement to take over the city, while the agent who signed him up keeps covering for him. Cold and talky, with long scenes of men at tables.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Drama
The first Black officer on the Colorado Springs force answers a Klan recruitment ad by phone and sends a white colleague to the meetings in his place. Funny for long stretches, then it stops being funny.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Drama
The rise of Queen from a pub band to Live Aid, following Freddie Mercury from his first audition to the stadiums. Built around the songs, with the concerts staged at full length.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Drama
An insurance lawyer is handed the defence of a captured Soviet spy, then sent to a divided Berlin to trade him for a downed American pilot. Mostly negotiation, in cold rooms with careful men.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2018 · Comedy
A broke and prickly New York biographer works out that she can pay the rent by writing letters in dead authors' voices and selling them. Dry, funny, and largely two people drinking in bars.
AI estimate, not yet described
2002 · Crime
A teenager passes himself off as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer while cashing millions in forged cheques, with one FBI agent slowly closing in. Light and quick, and always moving to another city.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
2002 · Crime
Two boys grow up in a Rio housing project through the sixties and seventies, one drifting toward photography and the other toward the drug trade. It moves fast and jumps between dozens of lives.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · Drama
A former wrestler in a village in Haryana decides his two daughters will win the gold medal he never did, and starts training them before either of them wants it. Long, loud, and built around the bouts.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · War
Churchill takes over as prime minister in May 1940, with France falling and his own cabinet pushing him to negotiate. Mostly arguments in small rooms and corridors.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2017 · Drama
During the 1967 riots, police pull a group of young Black men and two women out of a motel annexe and question them through the night. The middle hour stays in that corridor and does not let up.
AI estimate, not yet described
2004 · War
The last days in Hitler's bunker under Berlin, watched mostly by the young woman hired to type his letters. Almost all of it is underground, in German, with the shelling going on above.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · War
Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers are trapped on a French beach with the sea behind them, followed here through a soldier, a small boat and a fighter pilot. Almost no dialogue, and the tension barely lets up.
AI estimate, not yet described
2022 · Drama
The life of Elvis Presley, from a Memphis boyhood to the Las Vegas years, told by the manager who ran his career. Loud, fast-cut and packed with songs from start to finish.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Drama
Summer 1957, and Enzo Ferrari is close to losing the company while a marriage and a second household pull at him, with one long road race left to win. More kitchens and offices than racetrack.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Drama
The years between Neil Armstrong joining NASA and stepping onto the Moon, at home as much as in the cockpit. Quiet and close in, with the flying shot from inside the capsule.
AI estimate, not yet described
2019 · Drama
Ford hires a car designer and a difficult British driver to build something that can beat Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966. Half of it is engineering arguments in a workshop and half is cars at speed.
AI estimate, not yet described
2014 · Drama
An Olympic wrestler living in his brother's shadow takes an invitation to train at the estate of a very rich man who wants to be part of the sport. Slow and quiet, with nearly all of the tension in what nobody says.
AI estimate, not yet described
2013 · Drama
New Year's Eve in Oakland, and a twenty-two-year-old runs errands, picks up his daughter and tries to sort his life out. Based on real events, shot close and small, staying with one man hour by hour.
AI estimate, not yet described
2018 · Drama
A Bronx bouncer takes a job driving a Black concert pianist through the American South in 1962, guided by a book listing where he is allowed to stop. Two men in a car, talking, for most of it.
AI estimate, not yet described
2016 · War
A young man from Virginia signs up as an army medic in 1942 and will not touch a rifle, which his own side refuses to accept. The first half is home and boot camp, the second is Okinawa, and it is very violent.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Comedy
A mild college professor moonlights for the police, posing as a contract killer in sting operations, and turns out to be very good at inventing a new man for each job. Then one of the women he is sent to trap likes the man he is playing.
Sits near the middle on every axis.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Drama
A young television actor lives in a motel with the father who manages him, a former rodeo clown out on parole. Written by the actor it is based on, and it cuts between him as a boy and as a wrecked adult.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2008 · Drama
In the Maze prison in 1981, Republican inmates refuse to wear uniforms or wash, and one of them stops eating. Barely any dialogue, one very long conversation in the middle, and a lot of time in cells.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Comedy
An American figure skater comes up poor and hard in a sport that wants her sweet, told through interviews with everyone who was there. Funny and mean, and the people telling it keep contradicting each other.
AI estimate, not yet described
2024 · Drama
In Rio in 1971, a mother of five keeps the household running after soldiers take her husband away for questioning under Brazil's dictatorship. It stays close to the family and covers many years.
AI estimate, not yet described
2008 · Action
A quiet martial arts master in 1930s Foshan avoids fighting until the Japanese occupation leaves him nowhere to stand. Fights every ten minutes, and the rest is his household getting poorer.
AI estimate, not yet described
2021 · Drama
A Chicago car thief is picked up by the FBI and offered a deal: get close to the young chairman of the local Black Panther chapter and report back. It moves between the two men all the way through.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2019 · Drama
Judy Garland arrives in London in 1968 for a run of sold-out shows, broke, worn out and thirty years past The Wizard of Oz. Mostly hotel rooms, dressing rooms and the stage.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Crime
In 1920s Oklahoma the Osage are rich from the oil under their land, and one by one they start dying. Three and a half hours, told mostly from the side of the white men who married into the tribe.
AI estimate, not yet described
2021 · Drama
A father in Compton has a written plan for turning his two youngest daughters into tennis champions, and spends years pushing coaches, clubs and his own family to follow it. Warm and steady, and more about the household than the matches.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Crime
Tom Hardy plays both Kray twins, the brothers who ran a piece of 1960s London, while one of them courts a girl from Bethnal Green. Suits, nightclubs, and violence that arrives without warning.
AI estimate, not yet described
2015 · Drama
A five-year-old falls asleep on a train and wakes thousands of miles across India, and grows up adopted in Australia. The first half is a small boy alone in a huge country; the second is a man at a computer.
AI estimate, not yet described
Little-known
2016 · Drama
A white bricklayer and a Black woman marry in Virginia in 1958, where that is against the law, and are arrested in their own bedroom. Quiet and undramatic, with far more kitchen than courtroom.
AI estimate, not yet described
2023 · Drama
The conductor Leonard Bernstein and the actress Felicia Montealegre meet at a party and stay married for decades while he keeps a separate life going. Long scenes of the two of them talking, with whole years skipped between.
AI estimate, not yet described
2003 · Mystery
In 1986 a rural Korean province gets its first serial killings, and two local detectives who work by instinct and beatings are joined by a careful man from Seoul. It is often funny, and the case runs for years.
AI estimate, not yet described
2017 · Drama
A former skier ends up running the highest-stakes private poker game in America, and years later has to explain herself to a lawyer and the FBI. Fast, dense talk and voiceover, almost non-stop.
AI estimate, not yet described
2011 · Drama
The general manager of a baseball team with no money starts picking players by statistics instead of scouting instinct, and has to sell it to a clubhouse that thinks he has lost it. Mostly meetings, phone calls and arguments about numbers.
AI estimate, not yet described