Top music biography movies

Making a departure from her famous role in the Twilight franchise, Kristen Stewart portrays rocker Joan Jett of famous s-era band The Runaways. Jett believed the film captured the time well, but said she saw it as more of a narrative rather than a biopic. Gregory Nava wrote and directed the biographical film about the late Tejano singer Selena, who was fatally shot and killed by her fan club president, Yolnda Saldivar.

The Quintanilla family worked closely with Lopez as she prepared for her role, by offering to let the actress making her film debut to stay in their home. Abraham Quintanilla served as producer of the film and aimed for the film to immortalize his late daughter. The film received high praise.

Top music biography movies: Funny Girl () 95%

Dre return to their early beginnings in the hip-hop biopic they produced. Offering an authorized biography of the successful hip-hop group, Cube and Dre detail their journey from being aspiring teens to passionately working to make it in the then-white dominant industry. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. A sequel is in the works.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny Cash in the biopic of the late country star. Against the backdrop of a vibrant music scene and tumultuous cultural upheaval, an enigmatic year-old from Minnesota [More] ". Synopsis: The people of Detroit know 8 Mile as the city limit, a border, a boundary. It is also a psychological [More] ". Each segment brings a new and fresh take on Dylan's life.

Synopsis: Several actors portray legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan at different stages in his personal life and career. In a guitar-strumming [More] ". Though her extraordinary [More] ". Synopsis: The life of French singer Serge Gainsbourg. Synopsis: A chronicle of the rise and brief career of rock 'n' roll star Buddy Holly Gary Buseywho aspires to [More] ".

Synopsis: Glenn Miller James Stewart is a poor trombone player with dreams of fame. Eventually, through years of hard work and [More] ". Synopsis: Director Clint Eastwood, a noted jazz aficionado, directs this heartfelt study of pioneering bop saxophonist Charlie Parker Forest Whitaker. Moving [More] ". Synopsis: In the s, down-and-out jazz trumpeter Miles Davis Don Cheadle tries to recover his new session tape from music producers.

As [More] ". Synopsis: Pop star Diana Ross portrays legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday in this biographical drama. Beginning with Holiday's traumatic youth, the [More] ". Synopsis: Following the rise of Aretha Franklin's career from a child singing in her father's church's choir to her international superstardom, [More] ". Her father, Abraham [More] ".

Top Box Office. TV Shows. Trending on RT. Directed By: Brian Gibson. Critics Consensus: Barbara Streisand elevates this otherwise rote melodramatic musical with her ultra-memorable star turn as Fanny Brice. Directed By: William Wyler. Directed By: Roman Polanski. Critics Consensus: As lyrical and bittersweet as the music its subject left behind, Blaze takes a decidedly unconventional -- yet richly rewarding -- approach to the musical biopic.

Directed By: Ethan Hawke. Critics Consensus: Affectionate without sacrificing honesty, Behind the Candelabra couples award-worthy performances from Michael Douglas and Matt Damon with some typically sharp direction from Steven Soderbergh. Directed By: Steven Soderbergh. Critics Consensus: Featuring a strong performance from Geoffrey Rush, Shine succeeds in telling a compelling, inspirational story without resorting to cheap sentimentality.

However, at its heart, the film remains a stunning reminder of Valens' lasting impact on pop music: Fittingly, La Bamba helped bring Los Lobos' cover of his signature song to Number One upon its release. Shuffling around a large, empty house in the Washington woods, surrounded by hangers-on who take notice of him top music biography movies when they want money or drugs, Michael Pitt's Blake seems less like a man about to take his own life than one who's already died and is waiting for his body to catch up.

Like Elephant 's riff on the Columbine massacre, this fictionalized version of a rock star's path to suicide offers ambiguity in lieu of explanation, challenging the biopic's inherent promise of tidy explanations and comforting rationales. It's as cryptic and fragmented as Cobain's lyrics, but with none of the cathartic anger that for a time burned away the fog.

Director Brian Gibson's adaptation of Tina Turner's best-selling autobiography is unfortunately best remembered for its graphic and borderline salacious depictions of domestic violence. But that viewpoint overlooks the subtler early scenes between the excellent Laurence Fishburne as Ike Turner and Angela Bassett as Tina — who rightly earned Best Actor and Actress Oscar nominations for their performances — which demonstrate how the artists' clear rapport with one another is ultimately betrayed by Ike's abuse.

Top music biography movies: The Pianist () 95% 96%

Throughout the film, Bassett ably embodies Tina Turner's purposefulness, whether strutting across the stage as she sings "Proud Mary," or learning to chant "Om" as a Buddhist convert. Anton Corbijn spent most of his life hanging out with rock stars, photographing everyone from U2 to Depeche Mode to Tom Waits. So it's little surprise that, for his directorial debut, he made a movie about a singer.

In ControlJoy Division frontman Ian Curtis Sam Riley is a melancholy boy even before committing suicide at age 23, but what gives this stripped-down drama its pathos is its lack of illusions about the unhappiness that dogged him throughout his short life. In this way, Control eschews the typical rags-to-riches-to-rags biopic narrative: Riley doesn't play Curtis as a raging egotist but, rather, as a deeply troubled soul who turned his pain into beautiful music for as long as he could before the pain eventually consumed him.

Just like Joy Division's albums, Control is gloriously, candidly bleak. Based largely on Katherine Jackson's autobiography My Family, this biopic on the brothers Jackson charts the rise of the chart-topping siblings from their early "ABC" days to the Victory tour — as well as the subsequent solo career of Michael as he tries to both retain a fleeting sense of normalcy amid superstardom.

Tawdriness is inescapable when dissecting America's most famous musical family, and it's now impossible not to view the movie through the lens of the allegations that would haunt the Thriller hitmaker for the rest of his life. But real clips of the group interspersed with dramatic re-enactments still makes this a compelling portrait of pop's first family.

The first project after his "retirement" from making movies, Steven Soderbergh's HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra went further than a Hollywood feature would in detailing the full scope of Liberace's hermetic lifestyle. Michael Douglas' lead performance attracts and repels sympathy for the Vegas legend, showing him at worst as a vampiric narcissist who drained the life out of young and beautiful men and at best as a sensational performer who glittered in the spotlight.

Liberace's relationship with Scott Thorson Matt Damona lover he seduced and abandoned, brings him down to earth, but Douglas's charisma makes it impossible to push him away. Soderbergh paints him as a tragic figure, isolated by fame and fiction, living out his dreams while confined to gilded cage of his own creation. He gets everything right about Charles, who died just before the box office hit was released in the fall offrom the blind pianist's look and shuffling gait to his vocal intonations.

The movie is filled with top music biography movies acting, like future Scandal superstar Kerry Washington as Charles' wife, Bea, and Clifton Powell as Charles' long-suffering assistant, Jeff Brown; Regina King's portrayal of one of Charles' mistresses and backing singers, Margie Hendricks of the Raelettes, is a true revelation. She should have been nominated for an Oscar too.

Dexter Gordon embodies his lead role of the aged, world-weary tenor saxophonist Dale Turner based loosely on both Bud Powell and Lester Young so well that the late musician had to remind people that Round Midnight is a work of fiction. His Oscar-nominated performance is complemented by Bertrand Tavernier's solid direction, which gives his flick the smoky, melancholic atmosphere of a slow blues.

Top music biography movies: What's Love Got to Do With

As it stands, this gorgeous Woody Guthrie biopic — which netted a second Oscar for the late cinematographer Haskell Wexler — speaks profoundly to the relationship between the artist and the ravaged land that inspired and absorbed his music. Set during the height of the Great Depression, the film follows Guthrie David Carradine on a westward migration from his home in Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the fertile promise of California.

Typical of Seventies heroes, Carradine's Guthrie is a flawed, difficult, enigmatic figure, but a potent symbol of righteousness and relief for a country that ached for understanding. Murray Abraham into a fabulously entertaining drama about male competiveness and the mystery of genius. Jonathan Larson, the martyr-hero of the musical theater world, was 35 when he died of an aortic dissection on the night of the first Off-Broadway preview of his masterpiece Rent in In its own way, the central relationship in Amadeusbetween the divinely inspired but insipidly crude Wolfgang Mozart Tom Hulce and the haughty but mediocre Antonio Salieri F.

Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for his roleis as paradigmatic as Romeo and Juliet, King Arthur and Lancelot, the black hat and the white hat. True crime has become one of the most popular storytelling genres of the modern era. An entire category of podcasts has sprouted up around the genre, and the same goes for documentaries and scripted TV and big-screen thrillers.

Like horror inspired meta films like Scream in the '90s, the genre's popularity has even influenced the creation of semi-parodic shows like Only Murders in the Building, which follows a trio of characters who are so obsessed with true crime that they transform into amateur detectives themselves. While it has exploded in popularity over the past 10 years, though, true crime has been around for centuries and has been a popular form of storytelling for several decades now.

With that in mind, here are 10 of the best true crime movies.