Time's 10 Best Movies Based on a True Story

"Movies based on true stories are a special breed of entertainment. We began by creating a pool of 70 contenders: every movie that met our own "based on a true story" standard and appeared at the time of the survey on the IMDB top 100 movies list, IMDB's list of popular movies based on a true story, the AFI top 100, the Rotten Tomatoes top 100 or the All-TIME 100 Best Movies list. Ten TIME staffers and ten historians then ranked each of the 70 films on a scale of one to five—based on preference, not accuracy. After disqualifying movies that had been seen by fewer than half of the respondents, as well as movies with overwhelmingly split votes (i.e. all fives and ones), these are the films with the highest average scores. In order to qualify, the central story in a film must be at least inspired by a real story that happened to real people — and a central character based on a real person must do things that his or her real-life counterpart actually did." - time.com