Great biopic? I guess it'd depend on whether the said biopic needs to be an accurate depiction of the life in question, which is a different thing from whether it's a great movie.

Off the top of my head, I'd say; Lawrence of Arabia, Amadeus, Desert Fox (with James Mason *great* as Rommel), Malcolm X, Pride of the Yankees (Lou Gehrig), and A Beautiful Mind, which I liked a lot, although it did get a lot of flak for not dealing with Nash's bisexuality.

Then there is the genre of dramatization of historical figures--rather different from biopic. I adore The Lion in Winter, but I would be hesitant to call this a biopic.

I'm not articulating this well, but of those movies I've seen, they are great just because of the one performance and the fact that the life they are portraying is so interesting. Amadeus with a so-so Wolfie would have been a terrible movie.

No, it wouldn't. Aside from anything else, the star of Amadeus is arguably Salieri.

I think that's just the nature of a biopic -- you can't really have a good character study of any kind without a strong performance from the character you're studying.

What Jessica said. The only exception I can think of is that Meryl Streep Susan Orleans biopic.

The only exception I can think of is that Meryl Streep Susan Orleans biopic.

Adaptation? That wasn't really a biopic, unless you mean it was a biopic of Charlie Kaufman. Except for the name and the fact that she wrote The Orchid Thief, everything about the Susan Orleans character was entirely fictional.

Patton. Not a biopic, more a dramatization of a historical figure.

Where does Shadowlands fit?

I think it's because fictional films are structured so each incident and character contributes to the forward momentum of the story. Biopics are based on life, where one damn thing happens after another--a good biopic picks and chooses among those incidents to shape it's story, but it's never going to have the dramatic cohesiveness a totally fictional story will.

BTW, saw Sideways last night. Loved it like crazy.

(Personally I found A Beautiful Mind quite boring, because it flirted with portraying the terrifying hyperconnective logic of active schizophrenia, and then skated away into Twue Wuv. Bleah.)

I suspect that biographical films are much more interesting when they're about a specific time period or topic -- Anne of the Thousand Days, the fact that Lawrence of Arabia doesn't talk at all about the parts of his life when he isn't in Arabia -- because then the film doesn't have to ramble through a life and then, at the end, manufacture a point to it all.

I think book biographies are easier to stomach, rambling along chronologically without having a point, and film documentaries are similar. But a biography with actors, perforce, applies the rules of fiction to a nonfictional source, and seems to benefit most often from turning its source into something more approaching fiction than not.

ETA: Weird x-post with the expert Robin!

Speaking of biopics - any word on The Aviator? (about Howard Hughes, starring that guy from Titanic.)