Flavorwire

As you might have read yesterday, our film editor Jason Bailey anointed Ben Affleck’s Argo as his film of the week. If you’re not familiar with the film, we won’t spoil too much of it, save to say that it’s based a true story — the sort of story that you wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t true. We rather enjoyed Argo, not least because the tale it relates is so outlandish, and watching it got us thinking about other films whose plots are the sort of thing that you’d never believe if they weren’t based on actual events. We’ve chosen a few of our favorites after the jump — are there any we missed?

Argo

So, as we pointed out above, the plot of Argo is so extraordinary that it’s the sort of thing that’d never get anywhere near being shot if it wasn’t a true story: a CIA agent rescues a bunch of Americans from Tehran by convincing them to pretend to be… a sci-fi film crew? Get outta here, son, no-one’s gonna believe that story. But no, honestly, it’s all true — the film version is dramatized somewhat (we can’t imagine that police cars really chased the plane containing said “film crew” across the Tehran tarmac) but the Canadian caper really did happen.