When you see that a movie is "based on a true story," that could mean it's an attempt at a faithful retelling with some dramatic license, or it could mean the true story was a one-sentence concept that the writers took off from. Unless you do some research, you won't know how close the movie comes to the original. Dr. Stephanie Starling did that research for quite a few recent movies. The movies above are graphed scene by scene, with blue indicating true, red indicating false, and the lighter colors used for varying levels of accuracy. As you can see, Selma was a theatrical recreation of what could have been a documentary, while The Imitation Game was almost all fictionalized. At Information is Beautiful, 18 movies are presented in interactive graphs, in which you can click on a scene and see a comparison of the movie scene to the real event. You can also vary the pedantry of the graphs, from "flexible" to "nothing but the truth." I just went through the graph for Bohemian Rhapsody and now feel like I've seen the movie. -via Digg
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