It may surprise you to learn that some of cinema's best crime dramas are actually based on true stories! Here are 32 films that pulled straight from the headlines.

Pitch Perfect's Anna Kendrick is making her directorial debut with a true-crime thriller.

The Wolf of Wall Street pair reunite in this upcoming true crime drama.

HBO Max has released the trailer and poster for John Dower’s upcoming documentary The Mystery of D.B. Cooper. For those unfamiliar with the D.B. Cooper case, Cooper was a mystery man who hijacked a 727 out of Portland, traded the passengers’ lives in exchange for $200,000, parachuted out of the plane over Washington State, and was never heard from again. It remains one of the great unsolved mysteries to this day. This is the kind of true crime story I live for because it doesn’t really have a darker tint to it. No one was …

Dev Patel has joined the true crime movie from I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie about the rise and violent fall of the 1980s male strip club Chippendales. As reported by Deadline, the attachment of both star and filmmaker has spurred interest from several studios in the project, which was developed by producer David Permut of Permut Presentations. [caption id="attachment_936846" align="alignright" width="360"] Image via Lionsgate / Searchlight Pictures[/caption] Patel will portray Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian American entrepreneur who bought a Los Angeles nightclub called Destiny II and transformed it into what would ultimately become Chippendales. Banerjee co-…

Scott Cooper, the director of the bleak western Hostiles and the upcoming horror film Antlers, is making his television debut with Angels & Demons, a true crime limited series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning article by Thomas French. As reported by Deadline, the show - which is wholly unrelated to the Dan Brown novel and its 2009 film adaptation - will be written and directed by Cooper, although at this early stage it’s unclear where the show will finally end up. [caption id="attachment_934727" align="alignright" width="360"] Image via Relativity Media[/caption] French’s article was published in the …

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HBO just released the trailer for the upcoming true crime limited series The Murders at White House Farm, and it looks like a sufficiently creepy and tense mystery/thriller about one of the most infamous crimes of the past 30 years. Originally airing in the UK earlier this year, the 6-episode drama hits HBO Max later this month. In August of 1985, three generations of the Bamber-Caffell family were murdered in White House Farm in Essex, England. At first, the crime was thought to be a murder-suicide perpetrated by Sheila Caffell, the adopted daughter of Nevill and …

Hot off her starring turn in the year's best narrative feature The Invisible Man, Elisabeth Moss has signed on to play accused axe murderer Candy Montgomery in the true crime series Candy from some of the folks behind The Act. The limited series is based on the true story of Montgomery, a married mother of two in Texas who allegedly killed her friend from church, Betty Gore, with an axe back in 1980. The case made headlines, especially when all the sordid details were revealed and Montgomery's motive was exposed. The story was previously adapted as a TV …

Serial killers documentaries are all the rage these days, but I remember a time when I felt embarrassed and rather guilty about my own fascination with them. It dates back as far as I can remember and always made me feel like I was a weirdo. Part of it was that when I was growing up, I shared a first name with the most famous serial killer at the time — Jeffrey Dahmer — and I remember reading about this other Jeffrey with a morbid curiosity. I recall being terrified while watching The Silence of the Lambs at a neighbor's house …

As a journalist, I've always taken some pride in the fact that, sometimes, the pen is mightier than the sword. The job is to speak truth to power, but at some point, the media becomes the most powerful party. A reporter can take a single fact, or set of facts, and spin them any number of ways. The media is supposed to cover events as they happen, but often times they can influence those events, and it's those cases that are examined in Netflix's new documentary series Trial by Media. It's a great idea for a …

In late February, Showtime released a trailer for a new documentary series titled Outcry that was slated to premiere on April 3. In mid-March, the network allowed TV critics to watch the first two episodes. 48 hours later, Showtime opted to push the premiere date, and today, the network has finally announced that Outcry will debut on July 5. Since Collider never ran that first trailer, I'm including it below a new first-look video that Showtime released on Monday. I want you to have as much footage as possible, because this is the kind of sensitive case …

Netflix has released the trailer for the upcoming true crime documentary series The Innocence Files, and it looks great. While the obsession with many true crime docs comes from how crazy the murders are, how insane the “bad guy” is, or trying to figure out whodunit in the first place, The Innocence Files takes a different approach. This nine-episode series sheds a light on the personal stories behind eight cases of wrongful conviction, and the process by which the good folks at The Innocence Project fought to help get them out of prison. Indeed, fawning over Tiger King memes …

Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, but most times it's not. Sometimes people behave just the way you expect them to: They take advantage of an opportunity, they get addicted along the way (to the thrill of getting away with it, the accolades they receive, or the effects of literal drugs), they make mistakes, and they commit a series of small sins without the intention of harming others. And sometimes those small sins add up to be crimes that affect tens of thousands of people, as in the case of the new Netflix true-crime documentary How to Fix …

If you’re looking for the next great true crime show to binge-watch on Netflix, you've come to the right place. There’s been a significant rise in true crime documentaries ever since the streaming world opened up, which has allowed a number of stranger-than-fiction stories to be told. A great true crime docuseries ropes you in with a fascinating hook, then delves deeper and deeper into the case with each subsequent episode. And while murder is certainly a theme on our list here, there are a few true crime shows focused on non-violent crimes …

FX has released a trailer for The Most Dangerous Animal of All, the network's first true-crime docu-series that dives into one man's possible shocking connection to history's most famous cold case. The four-part series is based on the book by Gary L. Stewart, whose search for the father he never knew led him to believe he might be the son of the notorious Zodiac killer. This is a...genuinely insane story, and almost impossible to believe in that way most true-crime seems impossible to believe. I mean, this FX series isn't about …

Documentaries are great when you want a good, real story. If true crime is not your thing, check out these other documentaries on Netflix.

True Crime fans are loving the Netflix documentaries Don't F With Cats and Killer Inside, but how do they compare?

There's something oddly callow about Liz Garbus' adaptation of Robert Kolker's non-fiction book Lost Girls. Adaptation is always tricky, and Kolker's story tries to examine the larger consequences of a case surrounding the disappearances and deaths of five sex workers in Long Island. A movie, especially one that took the route of a feature adaptation rather than a docu-series, would have to find a way to focus its narrative, but Lost Girls always seems to miss the bigger picture. While it has an interesting angle about one mother's anger and determination to find out …

Steve Martin and Martin Short have been touring together for years, but now they’re coming to a streaming service near you with a great-sounding original series. Hulu announced today that it has ordered straight-to-series an untitled comedy series starring Martin and Short, co-created and written by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (Grace & Frankie, Looking). Martin and Hoffman will executive produce alongside This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, Jess Rosenthal, and Martin Short. The show will be produced by 20th Century Fox Television. The series revolves around three strangers who are obsessed with true crime …