The Best Based On True Story Movies on Netflix

What it's about: The true story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved over a thousand Jewish lives from the Nazis while they worked as slaves in his factory during World War II.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: The King's Speech tells the story of the man who became King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II. After his brother abdicates, George ('Bertie') reluctantly assumes the throne. Plagued by a dreaded stutter and considered unfit to be king, Bertie engages the help of an unorthodox speech therapist named Lionel Logue. Through a set of unexpected techniques, and as a result of an unlikely friendship, Bertie is able to find his voice and boldly lead the country into war.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $1.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: Loosely based on the true-life tale of Ron Woodroof, a drug-taking, women-loving, homophobic man who in 1986 was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: A five-year-old Indian boy gets lost on the streets of Calcutta, thousands of kilometers from home. He survives many challenges before being adopted by a couple in Australia; 25 years later, he sets out to find his lost family.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $1.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: The true story of technical troubles that scuttle the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1971, risking the lives of astronaut Jim Lovell and his crew, with the failed journey turning into a thrilling saga of heroism. Drifting more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts work furiously with the ground crew to avert tragedy.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren work to help a family terrorized by a dark presence in their farmhouse. Forced to confront a powerful entity, the Warrens find themselves caught in the most terrifying case of their lives.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 5 services (iTunes, Microsoft & 3 others).

What it's about: The Theory of Everything is the extraordinary story of one of the world’s greatest living minds, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who falls deeply in love with fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: In the run-up to the 1972 elections, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward covers what seems to be a minor break-in at the Democratic Party National Headquarters. He is surprised to find top lawyers already on the defense case, and the discovery of names and addresses of Republican fund organizers on the accused further arouses his suspicions. After the editor of the Post runs with the story and assigns Woodward and Carl Bernstein to it, they find the trail leading higher and higher in the Republican Party—and eventually into the White House itself.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 6 services (iTunes, Google Play & 4 others).

What it's about: The true story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to public office. In San Francisco in the late 1970s, Harvey Milk becomes an activist for gay rights and inspires others to join him in his fight for equal rights that should be available to all Americans.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $3.99 on 6 services (iTunes, Google Play & 4 others).

What it's about: A revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President's tumultuous final months in office. In a nation divided by war and the strong winds of change, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of generations to come.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: Lagaan tells the tale of the Indian village Champaner, beset by drought and British colonialism in the year 1893. Without a drop of rain in months, the worried villagers of Champaner decide to ask the local authorities for a temporary repeal of their taxes -- the hated lagaan. Led by the heroic Bhuvan (Indian superstar Aamir Khan) they bring their plight to the military governor, Captain Russell (Paul Blackthorne). But the sadistic Russell threatens to raise the lagaan threefold, unless the villagers can beat his men at a game of cricket, in which case he'll lift taxes on the entire province for a period of three years. Bhuvan accepts the challenge, but there's a problem -- no one in Champaner knows how to play cricket. A band of misfits come to the rescue, coached by Russell's soft-hearted sister Elizabeth (Rachel Shelley), and the race is on to be ready in three months' time. An epic reworking of Victory with eye-popping song-and-dance routines.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Quiz Show is a 1994 American historical drama film which tells the true story of the Twenty One quiz show scandal of the 1950s.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: When Iraq invades Kuwait in August, 1990, a callous Indian businessman becomes the spokesperson for more than 170,000 stranded countrymen.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 3 services (iTunes, Google Play & YouTube).

What it's about: British soldiers guarding the Kajaki Dam set out to rescue a three-man team after one of them loses a leg to a landmine.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: A chronicle of the crimes of Ted Bundy, from the perspective of his longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, who refused to believe the truth about him for years.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: The drama tells the story of Lennon's teenage years and the start of his journey to becoming a successful musician. The story also examines the impact on his early life and personality of the two dominant females in his childhood

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $9.99 on 2 services (Vudu & PlayStation Store).

What it's about: It's 1968, and four young, talented Australian Aboriginal girls learn about love, friendship and war when they entertain the US troops in Vietnam as singing group The Sapphires.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $1.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: This year, over 5 million American kids will be bullied at school, online, on the bus, at home, through their cell phones and on the streets of their towns, making it the most common form of violence young people in this country experience. The Bully Project is the first feature documentary film to show how we've all been affected by bullying, whether we've been victims, perpetrators or stood silent witness. The world we inhabit as adults begins on the playground. The Bully Project opens on the first day of school. For the more than 5 million kids who'll be bullied this year in the United States, it's a day filled with more anxiety and foreboding than excitement. As the sun rises and school busses across the country overflow with backpacks, brass instruments and the rambunctious sounds of raging hormones, this is a ride into the unknown.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $1.99 on 5 services (iTunes, Google Play & 3 others).

What it's about: In Norway on 22 July 2011, right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 young people attending a Labour Party Youth Camp on Utöya Island outside of Oslo. This three-part story will focus on the survivors of the attacks, the political leadership of Norway, and the lawyers involved.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Madrid, June 1991. After celebrating a session of Ouija with her friends, Verónica is besieged by dangerous supernatural presences that threaten to harm her entire family.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: A couple on a deep-wilderness hike become hopelessly lost within an aggressive black bear's territory.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $3.99 on 5 services (iTunes, Google Play & 3 others).

What it's about: Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Mumbai, 2015. Raghav, a drug addict policeman who maintains a turbulent relationship with his girlfriend Simmy, and Raman, a serial killer obsessed with Raman Rhagav's heinous crimes, a notorious psychopath convicted in 1969, get caught in a ruthless cat-and-mouse game, a dark path with no return for both of them.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: A tale of cheats and impostors, taking its inspiration from true facts and from one of the most intriguing characters of recent decades: the spy Francisco Paesa.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $0.99 on 1 service (Prime Video).

What it's about: It is the late 1950s. Flourishing under the economic miracle, Germany grows increasingly apathetic about confronting the horrors of its recent past. Nevertheless, Fritz Bauer doggedly devotes his energies to bringing the Third Reich to justice. One day Bauer receives a letter from Argentina, written by a man who is certain that his daughter is dating the son of Adolph Eichmann. Excited by the promising lead, and mistrustful of a corrupt judiciary system where Nazis still lurk, Bauer journeys to Jerusalem to seek alliance with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. To do so is treason — yet committing treason is the only way Bauer can serve his country.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 3 services (Vudu, PlayStation Store & FandangoNOW).

What it's about: Based on the true story of an award-winning investigative journalist -- and avowed atheist -- who applies his well-honed journalistic and legal skills to disprove the newfound Christian faith of his wife... with unexpected, life-altering results.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: Well-educated, New Hampshire mother, Linda Bishop, was determined to stay free of the mental health system after her early release from a 3 year commitment to New Hampshire State Hospital. Instead, she became a prisoner of her own mind, a fate which she documents in one of the most evocative and chilling accounts of mental illness and of our systemic failure to protect those suffering from it.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $4.99 on 2 services (iTunes & Prime Video).

What it's about: International art dealer Ron Hall must befriend a dangerous homeless man in order to save his struggling marriage to his wife, a woman whose dreams will lead all three of them on the journey of their lives.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 9 services (iTunes, Google Play & 7 others).

What it's about: Susannah Cahalan, an up-and-coming journalist at the New York Post becomes plagued by voices in her head and seizures, causing a rapid descent into insanity.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: A portrait of the brilliant, extravagant Kristina of Sweden, queen from age six, who fights the conservative forces that are against her ideas to modernize Sweden and who have no tolerance for her awakening sexuality.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $1.99 on 6 services (iTunes, Google Play & 4 others).

What it's about: The savage murders of three young children sparks a controversial trial of three teenagers accused of killing the kids as part of a satanic ritual.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $0.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: A true story of Samy, native of La Courneuve, who is out of love for Nadia, decides to climb the Mount Everest.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Based on the incredibly true story of a Spanish man with Multiple Esclorosis who tried to finish an Iron-Man: 3,8km swimming, 180km cycling and 42 running. And he was told that he could not make 100 meters.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: A biopic of Indonesia’s third president, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, illuminates his lifelong devotion to his wife. The movie, Habibie & Ainun, opens with a rickshaw ride on a rainy night in Bandung, West Java, in the 1960s. Habibie (played by Reza Rahadian) asks Ainun (Bunga Citra Lestari) to marry him and to join him on his trip to Germany.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $3.99 on 1 service (iTunes).

What it's about: Tells the incredible true story of Amberley Snyder, a nationally ranked rodeo barrel racer who defies the odds after barely surviving a car accident that leaves her paralyzed from the waist down.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Decorated Vietnam hero Frank Vega returns home only to get shunned by society leaving him without a job or his high school sweetheart. It's not until forty years later when an incident on a commuter bus (where he protects an elderly black man from a pair of skin heads) makes him a local hero where he's suddenly celebrated once again. But his good fortune suddenly turns for the worse when his best friend Klondike is murdered and the police aren't doing anything about it.

Where to Watch: Available to watch free online (Tubi TV), stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix & Prime Video) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 8 services (iTunes, Google Play & 6 others).

What it's about: The inspiring life story of the late photojournalist, artist and activist Dan Eldon, who abandoned a comfortable life in London to document the struggle, heartbreak and hope of a war-torn and famine-ridden region of Africa.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 5 services (iTunes, Google Play & 3 others).

What it's about: Ancient Korea, July 4, 1762. The Crown Prince Hyojang, posthumously named Sado, son of King Yeongjo of Joseon, is accused of treason. Thus, the king asks him to commit suicide, but his closest vassals prevent it, so the king orders the prince to get inside a wooden rice chest, where he suffers deprivation of food and water.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: A mother travels to Patagonia with her autistic son with the hope that a ranger and a pod of wild orcas can help him find an emotional connection.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: The journey of a professional wrestler who becomes a small town pastor and moonlights as a masked vigilante fighting injustice. While facing crises at home and at the church, the Pastor must evade the police and somehow reconcile his violent secret identity with his calling as a pastor.

Where to Watch: Available to watch free online (Tubi TV), stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: A drama about the less known aspects of the trading activity inside one of the biggest banks in the world - Société Générale. The movie tracks the rise and fall of anonymous trader turned superstar turned escape goat - Jérôme Kerviel - just as the 2008 financial crisis was unfolding

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 5 services (iTunes, Google Play & 3 others).

What it's about: In the 1940s, Malays were world-renowned for their seafaring skills. Being of Bugis descent, they navigated the sea with natural ease and were often the favored seamen for international shipping lines. Pulang tells the story of one such sailor. Othman, a fisherman from a small village in Malacca, leaves his family behind to sail the world, with hopes to return home one day with worldly riches and deserved pride. After decades at sea, however, his low wages as a deckhand leaves him disillusioned. He contemplates returning home to his family but ended up settling down in Liverpool, England. 60 years later, his grandson, Ahmad, journeys halfway across the world in search of his grandfather. Inspired by true events, Pulang tells the story of two men who yearn to find the only place they belong: HOME.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix).

What it's about: Anna’s story takes place on Åland Island in 1666, during the beginning of the most widespread and systematic witch-hunts in Scandinavian history. In all, 16 women were convicted of being in league with the devil, and seven of them were executed. For Judge Psilander, who has mastered the newest witch theories of the time, the trials are meant to cleanse the island of superstition, to have science and common sense prevail. The main character, the intelligent and stubborn Anna, gets an intimate view of the events, having just started working as a maid in the judge’s house. To Anna’s misfortune, she falls intensely in love with her friend Rakel’s husband Elias, but his infatuation with her quickly fades. A hurt and jealous Anna decides to get revenge and falsely reports Rakel to Judge Psilander. It’s only when Rakel is arrested, and things get out of hand, that Anna realizes the gravity of her doings.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $0.99 on 4 services (iTunes, Google Play & 2 others).

What it's about: Inspired by one of the longest and bloodiest real-life events in police history, Officer Mike Chandler and a young civilian passenger find themselves under-prepared and outgunned when fate puts them squarely in the crosshairs of a daring bank heist in progress by a fearless team of highly-trained and heavily-armed men.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 2 services (Vudu & PlayStation Store).

What it's about: Based on the Christa Worthington case. An out of work fisherman has an affair with a fashion writer wintering on the Cape. She returns two years later with his child, and when she is murdered, the fisherman is the prime suspect.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix & Prime Video) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 7 services (iTunes, Google Play & 5 others).

What it's about: Three ghost-hunting high-schoolers visit the Moore House in Villisca, Iowa—the site of one of America’s most grisly unsolved mass murders. After their private tour is interrupted, the group sneaks back in at night, unaware of the otherworldly terror that awaits them.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 6 services (iTunes, Google Play & 4 others).

What it's about: The strangest thing about this story is that it's true. In 1952, Argentina's beloved First Lady, Eva Perón, died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. A renowned embalmer was commissioned by the grieving Juan Perón to preserve her body for display, and Argentines flocked to be near "Evita." Three years later, when his government was overthrown by a military coup, Perón fled the country before he could make arrangements for the transportation of his wife's body. The military junta now in control kidnapped the corpse; so afraid were they of Eva's symbolic power that they even made it illegal to utter her name. Thus began the two-decade journey of Eva's body throughout Europe and eventually back to Argentina.

Where to Watch: Available to stream on a popular subscription service (Netflix) & rent or buy from $2.99 on 6 services (iTunes, Google Play & 4 others).