Full list of every Best Picture Academy Award-winning movie based on or inspired by books, novels, and comic books.
In 1981 at a bus stop in Savannah, Georgia, a man named Forrest Gump recounts his life story to strangers who sit next to him on a bench. He lives alone with his mother, who runs a boarding house out of their home that attracts many tenants, including a young Elvis Presley, who plays the guitar for Forrest and incorporates Forrest’s jerky dance movements into his performances.
Two Hobbits, Sméagol and Déagol, are fishing when Déagol discovers the One Ring in the river. Gollum leads Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to Minas Morgul, where they watch the Witch-king of Angmar, leader of the nine Nazgûl, lead an army of Orcs towards Gondor.
The offspring of the head of New York’s most influential Mafia dynasty returns from war with a resolve to forge his own path, only to find himself drawn into a conflict between his father’s entrenched traditions and the encroaching rivals endangering the family’s enterprise.
In AD 180, Hispano-Roman General Maximus Decimus Meridius intends to return to his home after he leads the Roman army to victory against the Germanic tribes near Vindobona on the Limes Germanicus. Emperor Marcus Aurelius tells Maximus that his own son, Commodus, is unfit to rule and that he wishes Maximus to succeed him, as regent, to help save Rome from corruption and restore the Roman Republic.
Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. Crawford ‘s real intention, however, is to try to solicit Lecter’s assistance in the hunt for a serial killer dubbed ‘Buffalo Bill’, whose modus operandi involves kidnapping overweight women, starving them for up to two weeks, killing and skinning them and dumping the remains in nearby rivers.
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 1950, Michael Corleone, the son of American Mafia Don Vito Corleone, is preparing to return home to America after his exile in Sicily. Don Croce and Michael’s father have allied to help the famous bandit Salvatore ‘Turi’ Guiliano escape Sicily and go with Michael to America.
In Oregon in the fall in 1963 , repeat offender Randle Patrick McMurphy is transferred to a mental institution after serving a few months on a prison farm on charges of assault and statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl. Upon arriving at the hospital, he finds the ward is being dominated by head nurse Mildred Ratched, a cold, passive-aggressive tyrant who uses her authority to intimidate her patients.
In Texas, 1980, hitman Anton Chigurh strangles a deputy sheriff to escape custody and uses a captive bolt pistol to kill a driver and steal his car. Following an electronic tracking device hidden in the money, Chigurh goes to Moss’s motel room and kills a group of Mexicans who are waiting to ambush Moss with his shotgun.
In 1947, John Nash arrives at Princeton University as co-recipient, with Martin Hansen, of the prestigious Carnegie Scholarship for mathematics. Bored with his regular duties at MIT, including teaching, he is recruited by the mysterious William Parcher of the United States Department of Defense with a classified assignment: to look for hidden patterns in magazines and newspapers in order to thwart a Soviet plot.
Eighteen-year-old Jamal Malik, an Indian Muslim from the Dharavi slum, is a contestant on Kaun Banega Crorepati, and is one question away from the grand prize. However, before the $20 million question,he is detained and tortured by the police, who suspect him of cheating.
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.