A movie gains interest when we know it is based on true events. And when there is also a book behind it, that book becomes essential.
In Kraków during World War II, the Germans have forced local Polish Jews into the overcrowded Kraków Ghetto. To better protect his workers, Schindler bribes Göth into allowing him to build a sub-camp. As the Germans begin to lose the war, Göth is ordered to ship the remaining Jews at Płaszów to Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler asks Göth to allow him to move his workers to a new munitions factory he plans to build in Brünnlitz near his home town Zwittau.
In 1955, a young Henry Hill becomes enamored of the criminal life and Mafia presence in his working class Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn. Henry starts dating Karen Friedman, a Jewish woman. In 1970, Billy Batts, a made man in the Gambino crew who was recently released from prison, repeatedly insults Tommy at a nightclub owned by Henry; Tommy and Jimmy then beat, stab and shoot him to death.
Frank Abagnale Jr. idolizes his father, who’s in trouble with the IRS. Frank runs away when his parents divorce. Needing money, he turns to confidence scams to survive and his cons grow bolder. He impersonates an airline pilot and forges Pan Am payroll checks. Soon, his forgeries are worth millions of dollars.
In late 1823, Hugh Glass guides Captain Andrew Henry’s trappers through the territory of the present-day Dakotas. Guided by Glass, the survivors travel on foot to Fort Kiowa, because he believes that traveling downriver will make them vulnerable.
City of God is set in a city renowned for its natural beauty. The film follows the lives of gangsters and petty criminals living in the Favela. Set from the 1960s through to the 1980s, in the beginning, delinquents make money through hold-ups. In the 1970s, cocaine arrives and takes its place in the criminals’ lives, both dealing and consuming vast amounts.
Solomon Northup is a free African-American man in 1841, working as a violinist and living with his wife and two children in Saratoga Springs, New York. Two white men, Brown and Hamilton, offer him short-term employment as a musician if he will travel with them to Washington, D.C.; however, once they have arrived, they drug Northup and deliver him to a slave pen run by a man named Burch.
At the official closing of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium, Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V, addresses the crowd with a strong stammer. Bertie, as he is called by his family, believes the first session is not going well, but Lionel, who insists that all his patients address him as such, has his potential client recite Hamlet’s To be, or not to be soliloquy while hearing classical music played on a pair of headphones.
In April 1992, Christopher McCandless arrives in a remote area called Healy, just north of Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. McCandless travels into the wilderness and sets up a campsite in an abandoned city bus, which he calls The Magic Bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around him, and the thrill of living off the land.
On November 4, 1979, Iranian Islamists storm the United States embassy in Tehran in retaliation for President Jimmy Carter giving the Shah asylum in the U.S. during the Iranian Revolution. While on the phone with his son, he is inspired by watching Battle for the Planet of the Apes and begins plans for creating a cover story for the escapees: that they are Canadian filmmakers who are in Iran scouting exotic locations for a science-fiction film.
On July 4, 1969, an unknown man attacks Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau with a handgun at a lovers’ lane in Vallejo, California. One month later, the San Francisco Chronicle receives encrypted letters written by the killer calling himself the Zodiac, who threatens to kill a dozen people unless his coded message containing his identity is published.
In 1981, San Francisco salesman Chris Gardner invests his entire life savings in portable bone density scanners, which he demonstrates to doctors and pitches as a handy quantum leap over standard X-rays. While he is able to sell most of them, the time lag between the sales and his growing financial demands enrage his already alienated wife Linda, who works as a hotel maid.
Richard Phillips takes command of MV Maersk Alabama, an unarmed container ship from the Port of Salalah in Oman, with orders to sail through the Guardafui Channel to Mombasa, Kenya. One skiff turns around in response, and the other – manned by four heavily armed pirates led by Abduwali Muse – loses engine power trying to steer through Maersk Alabama’s wake. While they search the ship, Shane sees that the youngest pirate Bilal does not have sandals and tells the crew to line the engine room hallway with broken glass.