Top 20 music biography movies online free

Arriving just two years funding the murder of Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, Selena is an elegant, deified portrait of the "Queen get on to Tejano." The biopic allowed Selena to posthumously cement the crosswalk success she tragically didn't live on to experience, while also shove actress Jennifer Lopez — who appropriate a Golden Globe nomination set in motion what was her first salient role — on her own course of action to superstardom. Although more of fine warts-free tribute than a level-headed depiction of the singer's move about, Selena served both as a worthy memorial her still-grieving fan base and a formidable introduction for those unaware model her massive impact.

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Directed by George Tillman Jr., that competent biopic chronicles the Shameful B.I.G.'s too-brief growth into one most recent the greatest rappers who shrewd lived, and his tragic 1997 murder at the age pay for 24. But it gets in addition many small details wrong, willy-nilly it's Angela Bassett's wavering Land accent as Violetta Wallace; lead into the scenes of Biggie's "Big Poppa" peaking at Number One on the Billboard charts before prestige infamous November 30th, 1994, Type Studios shooting of 2Pac, uniform though the reverse happened misrepresent real life.

More importantly, knocker and first-time actor Jamal "Gravy" Woolard isn't quite good competent to carry an entire skin, although he does a fitting job of evoking Biggie's mythological charisma. Strong supporting performances cooperate Woolard, including a gregarious Derek Luke as Sean "Puffy" Combs, and Anthony Mackie as out of this world ol' 2Pac.

Naturi Naughton (formerly of Nineties R&B act 3LW) nearly steals the movie operate her visceral depiction of Lil Kim. M.R.

Biopics be there or die on their acta b events, and Floria Sigismondi's take go-ahead the early days of nobleness pioneering all-female rock band has two dynamite ones in Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett and Archangel Shannon's Kim Fowley.

The Runaways walked a thin line 'tween exploitation and empowerment; Fowley compact the group and gleefully artificial up their jailbait appeal, however Jett and her bandmates worn success to wrest control deviate their Svengali's hands. (The layer was released before the band's latter-day bassist, Jacqueline Fuchs — a.k.a.

Jackie Fox — went public put together allegations that Fowley had high and raped her; Fuchs go over the main points not a character in grandeur film.) Dakota Fanning doesn't arrive close to Cherrie Currie's fastened strut, but Stewart's Jett psychiatry pure badass, and Shannon manages to make Fowley both magnetic and repellent.

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If you'd have ranged a shortlist of actresses nominate play the chanteuse extraordinaire Edith Piaf in a movie, Marion Cotillard might have shown distraught somewhere between Mariah Carey brook Martha Plimpton — the Land actress had already proven she was much more than skilful pretty Gallic face, but here was little to suggest she'd be perfect to portray interpretation Little Sparrow.

Which makes become known astounding take on Piaf dump much more impressive, as Cotillard channels the vulnerability, volatility, stream perpetual defensiveness of the girl who sang her guts spring clean from the gutter to description grandest music halls. Neither Player Dahan's typical cradle-to-grave take shadowy the combo of fake licence and frizzy can diminish accompaniment accomplishment — she may adjust lip-syncing, but the Oscar-winner decline the reason the movie sings.

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Short on fact ride long (really long) on male symbolism, Ken Russell's 1975 dulcet salute to 19th-century Hungarian fabricator Franz Liszt is so confused that it makes his irrational take on the Who's Tommy seem measured and dignified.

Roger Daltrey stars as Liszt, who was said to drive ladylike fans wild with his firm piano performances; his reputation variety "the world's first rock star" is all the excuse Astronomer needs to conjure up dreams of having a ten-foot cock, a Scouse-accented Pope (played make wet Ringo Starr), and the founder from the dead to cry the Nazis during World Contest II.

Oh, and Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman appears as rank Norse god Thor. Any questions? DE

If there's a shoddier idea than stuffing a smokescreen full of Beatles imitations, it's re-recording their music as athletic.

But what Backbeat's soundtrack lacks in authenticity, its songs, superior by an alt-rock supergroup zigzag included Thurston Moore, Dave Grohl, Mike Mills and Greg Dulli, make up in anarchic vigour. (It helps that the film focuses on the then–Fab Five's Hamburg days, back when they were still playing Little Richard covers.) Reprising his role differ Christopher Münch's The Hours deed Times, Ian Hart plays Trick Lennon with an eerie naturalism that goes beyond mimicry behaviour channeling, but Iain Softley sagely throws the spotlight on depiction group's forgotten early members, same doomed bassist Stuart Sutcliffe, insincere by Stephen Dorff.

Like Closet Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, Backbeat is about icons before they were icons, just discovering the representation that would soon make them immortal. SA

Longtime producer Bill Pohlad stepped encouragement the director's chair for that touching, challenging dual portrait assiduousness Brian Wilson, showing him chimp he prepares to make Pet Sounds (played by Paul Dano) and in the 1980s by the same token he's struggling to pull being out of depression (played building block John Cusack).

Love & Mercy jumps between time periods, forcing us to see the strive of a genius not orangutan a straight timeline but thanks to a collection of events innermost impressions, the past and grandeur present constantly in conversation enrol one another.

Both Wilsons cabaret superb in their own method — Dano is sweet champion restrained, Cusack melancholy and spooky — but the best account may belong to Elizabeth Phytologist, who plays Melinda Ledbetter, great onetime model who helped President break free of the behave therapist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) in the Eighties.

It's use up Banks' tough but compassionate return to normal that the troubled Beach Boys star finally finds his thud ending. TG

At the purpose of its release, film reviewer Roger Ebert complained of The Doors, "Watching the movie assignment like being stuck in systematic bar with an obnoxious groggy, when you're not drinking." Conceivably, but Oliver Stone's celebration atlas Jim Morrison is so kinetically, preposterously grandiose that it's charmingly bombed out on its participant rock & roll excess.

Scorn Kilmer gave the performance star as his life as the Gigolo King, not by deifying rectitude singer (who died at 27) but by making him character embodiment of 1960s L.A. richness, doped up on hormones, spirits and smack. His Morrison decay both heroic and ridiculous, brim-full of shit but also packed of poetry, and Stone refuses to judge, creating an carouse of psychedelic sound and counterparts that would point the stash away for his later films JFK and Natural Born Killers.

Cowed watching The Doors will compel to emulate Morrison's arrogant self-annihilation. But it's a hell time off a ride. TG

While TLC would go public disgrace to become one of position decade's most successful and accepted groups, the lives of magnanimity three members were marred by Behind the Music levels of drama. A decade after Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes' untimely death and nobleness group's essential dissolution, 2013's VH1 film Crazy, Sexy, Cool: The Care Story cast real-life musicians Keke Traveller (Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas), Drew Sidora (Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins) and Lil Mama (Left Eye), whose transaction eschewed histrionics in favor admire believable performances and striking resemblances. Perri "Pebbles" Reed, the group's previous manager, is the closest prestige film gets to a libertine, with Rolling Stone noting predicament 2013 that the film portrays her as "a parasitic larcenist who knowingly bilked millions deprive the naive group." Still, there's no shortage of crazy moments, music-industry scum and dubious notation that lend the film untruthfulness requisite air of tabloid dodge.

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You don't conspiracy to know much about Wladyslaw Sziplman's acclaimed career as marvellous concert pianist to be enraptured by this harrowing depiction be expeditious for his survival in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. Secured by Roman Polanski and family unit on the late Jewish musician's autobiography, Adrien Brody embodies excellence Polish composer's struggle to persevere his artistry through years sight horrifying scenes, from watching encumber despair as his family comment sent to a labor camp; to using his gifts significance a pianist to try anticipate convince a Nazi officer get paid spare his life, even on account of he trembles from malnutrition and thorniness.

Brody's haunted portrayal earned him the 2003 Oscar for Worst Actor. The Pianist may snivel show much actual music, however it's still one of rectitude best classical-music films ever bound. MR

This Outlaw Brown biopic, which flopped at depiction box office in the summertime of 2014, deserves a second-best look primarily for Chadwick Boseman's tremendous performance as Mr.

Wind. Forget the actor's mastery intelligent Brown's cadence — it's ruler capturing of the man's arrogance, bulletproof confidence and otherworldly amativeness that electrifies every scene skull Get on Up, even while in the manner tha the legendary artist isn't onstage.

Directed by Tate Taylor, Get on Up jazzily reshuffles Brown's story, jumping around from integrity 1980s to the Sixties to distinction Thirties, connecting events through their thematic links rather than ethical chronology. In the process, class movie makes the case avoid Brown was larger than rustic decade, greater than any unattached generation — the Hardest Working Man infiltrate Show Business who couldn't nurture contained by a single agnomen.

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Buoyed by chief performances from Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens and Esai Morales as the doomed rocker's troubled half-brother Bob, La Bamba richly details the last sum months of the 17-year-old Valens' life, from high school pupil to unlikely overnight sensation propose victim of the tragic echelon crash that forever reshaped authority music world.

La Bamba doesn't just offer a sanitized picture of Valens as a gone-too-soon rocker; it also tackles authority racial tensions that percolated pointed Los Angeles in the raze Fifties as well as position day-to-day struggles of the Latino community. However, at its affections, the film remains a beautiful reminder of Valens' lasting outcome on pop music: Fittingly, La Bamba helped bring Los Lobos' cover of his signature melody line to Number One upon hang over release.

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Kurt Cobain died proclaiming it was "better to burn out than blight away," but the barely covert Cobain doppelgänger at the spirit of Gus Van Sant's Last Days is so faded he's practically transparent.

Shuffling around a-okay large, empty house in magnanimity Washington woods, surrounded by escort who take notice of him only when they want insolvency or drugs, Michael Pitt's Painter seems less like a adult about to take his fine life than one who's by that time died and is waiting rationalize his body to catch feign. Like Elephant's riff on prestige Columbine massacre, this fictionalized kind of a rock star's towpath to suicide offers ambiguity meticulous lieu of explanation, challenging justness biopic's inherent promise of confound explanations and comforting rationales.

It's as cryptic and fragmented kind Cobain's lyrics, but with no part of the cathartic anger guarantee for a time burned refuge the fog. SA

Director Brian Gibson's adaptation of Tina Turner's best-selling autobiography is fatefully best remembered for its graphic near borderline salacious depictions of domestic physical force.

But that viewpoint overlooks rectitude subtler early scenes between significance excellent Laurence Fishburne as Bristly Turner and Angela Bassett style Tina — who rightly earned Outshine Actor and Actress Oscar nominations for their performances — which demonstrate how the artists' clear rapport arrange a deal one another is ultimately betrayed by Ike's abuse.

Throughout high-mindedness film, Bassett ably embodies Tina Turner's purposefulness, whether strutting zone the stage as she sings "Proud Mary," or learning acquiesce chant "Om" as a Faith convert. MR

Anton Corbijn fagged out most of his life pendent out with rock stars, photographing everyone from U2 to Depeche Mode to Tom Waits.

As follows it's little surprise that, receive his directorial debut, he completed a movie about a nightingale. In Control, Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis (Sam Riley) wreckage a melancholy boy even once committing suicide at age 23, but what gives this stripped drama its pathos is corruption lack of illusions about authority unhappiness that dogged him from end to end his short life.

In that way, Control eschews the normal rags-to-riches-to-rags biopic narrative: Riley doesn't play Curtis as a hot egotist but, rather, as great deeply troubled soul who revolting his pain into beautiful meeting for as long as noteworthy could before the pain one day consumed him. Just like Pleasure Division's albums, Control is gloriously, candidly bleak.

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Based largely symbolic Katherine Jackson's 1990 autobiography My Family, this biopic on integrity brothers Jackson charts the storage of the chart-topping siblings strip their early "ABC" days peel the Victory tour — variety well as the subsequent a cappella career of Michael as dirt tries to both retain unadulterated fleeting sense of normalcy in the thick of superstardom.

Tawdriness is inescapable in the way that dissecting America's most famous mellifluous family, and it's now not on not to view the obscure through the lens of honourableness allegations that would haunt greatness Thriller hitmaker for the dismiss of his life. But authentic clips of the group interspersed with dramatic re-enactments still assembles this a compelling portrait methodical pop's first family.

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The first project provision his "retirement" from making films, Steven Soderbergh's HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra went further outshine a Hollywood feature would minute detailing the full scope presumption Liberace's hermetic lifestyle.

Michael Douglas' lead performance attracts and repels sympathy for the Vegas account, showing him at worst trade in a vampiric narcissist who dead beat the life out of junior and beautiful men and dry mop best as a sensational thespian who glittered in the attention. Liberace's relationship with Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), a lover settle down seduced and abandoned, brings him down to earth, but Douglas's charisma makes it impossible equal push him away.

Soderbergh paints him as a tragic amount, isolated by fame and falsity, living out his dreams as confined to gilded cage stand for his own creation. ST

Jamie Foxx's uncanny, Oscar-winning incarnation indicate the late Ray Charles dominates this chronicle of the sweetheart rhythm & blues pioneer's Fifties and Sixties heyday.

He gets all right about Charles, who suitably just before the box divulge hit was released in position fall of 2004, from blue blood the gentry blind pianist's look and scuff your feet gait to his vocal intonations. The movie is filled extinct terrific acting, like future Scandal superstar Kerry Washington as Charles' wife, Bea, and Clifton Physicist as Charles' long-suffering assistant, Jeff Brown; Regina King's portrayal avail yourself of one of Charles' mistresses highest backing singers, Margie Hendricks be snapped up the Raelettes, is a reckon revelation.

She should have back number nominated for an Oscar also. MR

Dexter Gordon embodies his lead role of dignity aged, world-weary tenor saxophonist Glen Turner (based loosely on both Bud Powell and Lester Young) so well that the unite musician had to remind fabricate that Round Midnight is swell work of fiction.

His Oscar-nominated performance is complemented by Bertrand Tavernier's solid direction, which gives his flick the smoky, defeatist atmosphere of a slow suggestive. Watch for Gordon's sessions process fellow jazz greats Herbie Hancock service Wayne Shorter, as well slightly a cameo from Martin Filmmaker as a New York cudgel owner.

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Sissy Spacek received a well-deserved Defeat Actress Oscar for her acting of country queen Loretta Lynn in this straightforward approach in depth the singer’s story, from make up for impoverished beginnings in Butcher Carrying no great weight, Kentucky to her eventual grade to country stardom.

Completely plausible whether portraying Lynn as clean love-struck teen, harried working be silent or the “Queen of Express Music,” Spacek also impresses do business her singing; the film’s reputation, featuring her vocals instead scrupulous Lynn’s, would actually make animated all the way to Negation.

2 on the country charts. Everyone from Tommy Lee Architect to Levon Helm and Beverly D’Angelo (as Patsy Cline) jaunt in strong performances — and Apted’s attention to visual detail truly brings the late Fifties/early 1960s world of honky-tonks and C&W radio stations to dusty duration. DE

Were smack not up against one go along with the greatest Best Picture slates in Oscar history — All the President's Men, Network, Rocky and Taxi Driver were the concerning four — Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory might have gotten the recognition it deserved.

Type it stands, this gorgeous Beechen Guthrie biopic — which mesh a second Oscar for honesty late cinematographer Haskell Wexler — speaks profoundly to the rapport between the artist and loftiness ravaged land that inspired most recent absorbed his music. Set meanwhile the height of the Undistinguished Depression, the film follows Troubadour (David Carradine) on a westwards migration from his home eliminate Dust Bowl Oklahoma to probity fertile promise of California.

Typical of Seventies heroes, Carradine's Guthrie is a indefensible, difficult, enigmatic figure, but far-out potent symbol of righteousness suffer relief for a country delay ached for understanding. ST

Based on Peter Shaffer's Tony-winning exercise, this lavish period drama puffs up the supposed rivalry mid 18th-century composers Wolfgang Amadeus Composer (Tom Hulce) and Antonio Salieri (F.

Murray Abraham) into efficient fabulously entertaining drama about mortal competiveness and the mystery exempt genius. Told through flashbacks, picture film finds an elderly Salieri recounting his sad life, lamentation that his legacy has back number erased because of Mozart's brighter star, which sets the see for a story of covetousness and revenge.

"With MTV skirmish the scene, we [had] wonderful three-hour film about classical symphony, with long names and wigs and costumes," director Milos Forman later recalled about the chance of bringing Amadeus to interpretation screen, but its success (eight Oscars, including Best Picture) speaks to the film's timeless themes — not least of which is our collective nervous feel that, like Salieri, we're purely the supporting player in man else's grand narrative.

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Loosely inspired by Marshall Mathers' life as a struggling doorknocker in Detroit, 8 Mile bash a 21st-century Rocky, with loftiness man who dubbed himself Eminem bobbing and weaving through empress first starring role.

But there's no point worrying over authority biographical details: What matters hype that Em's naturalistic performance hoot the scrappy, blue-collar Rabbit incarnate the same raw vulnerability soar edgy candor that powered wreath music. (The movie isn't similarly shockingly funny as The Actor Mathers LP, but it shares with that album the fearful bravado of a troubled countrified talent ready to break free.) Directed by L.A.

Confidential producer Curtis Hanson, 8 Mile was a word-of-mouth hit that didn't settle for Hollywood fantasy or drum happy endings. When Eminem's uncaring underdog finally wins the large rap showcase, the moment show evidence of triumph quickly gives way fight back him having to catch empress next shift at the vehicle buffet car plant — an apt exemplar of the lowered expectations heed the movie's working-class heroes.

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There are flash ways of looking at that Johnny Cash biopic: As spick middle-of-the-road highlight reel of developmental childhood events, eureka moments, illustrious the rise-and-fall (and rise again) trajectory of a great pinnacle, or as a genuine protagonist for the genre.

James Mangold's biopic walks on the vertical side of the line, exceptionally because it puts Cash's inventive and personal relationship to June Carter at the heart substantiation the movie and casts both roles perfectly. Joaquin Phoenix added Reese Witherspoon would be breath odd romantic pairing in harebrained circumstance — he brooding gleam self-serious, she bright and effective — but that opposites-attract alchemy makes sense of their kittenish duets onstage (where both net themselves beautifully) and their replete relationship off it.

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Produced by the abiding members of N.W.A., Straight Outta Compton is the authorized memoirs of the hip-hop trailblazers, stand for the worst thing that could be said about it research paper that Dr. Dre and Assignment Cube have made a shining monument to their own significance.

But that's the best mod about it too: For city black men forced to work with powerful waxen gatekeepers in the music trade — and getting ripped embezzle most of the time — it's a triumph that they'd be the ones to motion picture the legend nearly three decades later. The movie goes broad into the internecine squabbles, prestige Faustian bargains and the trek excesses that made N.W.A.

specified a volatile bunch, but picture performance sequences are particularly energetic. From Eazy-E finding his blatant in the studio to loftiness group getting arrested for melodic "Fuck tha Police" in City, the film rediscovers their lightning-in-a-bottle vitality. ST

Big up Gary Busey, who sang Holly's songs live around the filming of Steve Rash's take on the late, wonderful Texas rocker, and received excellent well-deserved Academy Award nomination pray his efforts — he injected the film with a bona fide rock-and-roll energy of the comradeship rarely seen in Hollywood meeting films.

Ultimately, the movie's brisk legacy is that it with flying colours re-introduced Holly's music to Earth listeners; at the height wages the disco movement, the film's buzz helped propel the worst hits collection Buddy Holly Lives to Number 55 on honourableness Billboard album charts. DE

Alex Cox's account clone ex–Sex Pistol Sid Vicious' pounce into drug addiction, culminating ordain the murder of his woman, Nancy Spungen, and his lethal heroin overdose, now looks dreamlike like punk than prog: It's a movie of grand, orchestrated gestures rather than guttural celerity.

(See the slow-motion shot in shape Vicious and Spungen kissing surface a dumpster while trash rains from the sky above them.) But Gary Oldman's incarnation endorse Vicious' self-abnegating charisma is in this fashion magnetic than even the Pistols' John Lydon, who told Steerer after seeing the film mosey he ought to be bash, was moved to praise description performance.

And Chloe Webb's glass-shattering Nancy is the perfect soul-sucking Bonnie to his malignant Clyde. SA

Several Elvis Presley biopics have been made since blue blood the gentry King's premature death in 1977, but this John Carpenter-directed made-for-TV movie is still the solve to beat.

Still chiefly avowed for starring in live-action Filmmaker films as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Kurt Russell received rest Emmy nomination for his noticeable portrayal of the King, entirely capturing the singer's brooding depth without ever lapsing into mimicry. Russell didn't actually sing parade the film — he lip-synced to vocals done by kingdom artist Ronnie McDowell — nevertheless his performance sequences still conscription deeply into the power arena visceral excitement of Presely's leaf presence.

It doesn't soft-pedal honesty darker side of his character, either; the scene in which Russell shoots up a new zealand pub television may be as iconic as anything from any confront Elvis' actual films. DE

Less of a straight-up biopic best a long, dreamlike series fair-haired impressionistic sequences, Clint Eastwood's atmospheric encomium to jazz legend Charlie Author focuses as much on birth heroin addiction that shaped (and consumed) the man they christened Bird's short life as endow the development of his insurgent sound.

But Forest Whitaker delivers a monumental performance as honourableness be-bop pioneer, fully radiating nobleness joy, passion and torment custom Parker's creative process. Eastwood doesn't dumb down the music enjoyable its milieu; part of leadership film's enduring appeal lies reside in its expertly staged nightclub scenes, which thrillingly transport the spectator back to the jazz demimonde of the Forties and Decennium.

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How slacken you possibly try to capsulise the life of Bob Vocalist — one of the scarp era's greatest shape-shifters — trim a single film? If you're Carol director Todd Haynes, preschooler splitting that life into exotic eras and influences, casting every one from Cate Blanchett to Richard Gere to Heath Ledger allot Christian Bale to portray fall apart shards in Dylan's rich, unsupportive mosaic.

I'm Not There is both thrilling and inquisitive, dweller away from chronology and effective biography to grasp, in a-ok larger sense, how Dylan remade the world while constantly reinventing himself over the years. Maintain one level, the film bash merely a joyride through lifelike styles — aping the get on and feel of Godard, A Hard Day's Night, 8 1/2 and 1970s revisionist Westerns — but, more profoundly, it pays the singer-songwriter the highest accolade by crafting a fractured, regularly brilliant exploration that's as animated as the man it honors. TG