Adam McKay’s subprime meltdown drama is fast, witty and furiously righteous. But when it comes to the real events behind the story, is it a good bet?

The Leonardo DiCaprio adventure takes the basic facts of real-life frontiersman Hugh Glass’s ordeal and adds extra characters, extra ultraviolence and more horse guts

Tom Hooper’s earnest biopic of pioneering transgender icon Lili Elbe smooths out the wrinkles and the fun, losing sight of who she really was

The courts refused to censor this period Bollywood romance and rightly so. But while the historical howlers are irritating, its main problem is the imagined narrative is so dull

Steven Spielberg’s brisk race through cold war history mashes together some historically unrelated events but acting’s A-team saves the day

The symbolism is blatant and the gender politics iffy in this fanciful version of the Christians’ campaign, but it has a decent stab at historical balance

Historians still debate whether the violence of the women’s suffrage movement was justified. This movie commendably focuses on a working-class suffragette, but doesn’t attempt to make any of the really tough calls

Ron’s escape from hospital was more ingenious, Reg’s marriage less violent … Tom Hardy’s portrayal of both twins is admirable, unlike the film’s attention to detail

The NWA-backed sweep of the rappers’ rise to success fails to note some important moments, such as Dr Dre’s violence towards women

Michael Anderson’s 1955 dramatisation of the 1943 RAF mission to bomb German dams is fairly true to life and bounces along entertainingly

Alexander Korda’s 1936 movie breaks the biopic code and plays down a scandal – but its star’s brilliant turn as the Dutch master more than redeems it

Al Pacino hits his mark as a whistleblower patrolman who confronts dirty New York City cops in Sidney Lumet’s historically accurate 1973 drama

Colin Firth stars in this adaptation of the memoirs of a POW tortured by the Japanese military during the second world war. No movie could recreate such horrors, but it’s easy to forgive this redemptive tale its mild flights of fancy

Rufus Norris’s adaptation of the National Theatre musical, about the 2006 murder of prostitutes in Ipswich, offers a unique and disturbing take on tragedy

The tale of Princess Elizabeth and Margaret’s sortie among the wild nighttime celebrations of commoners on VE Day loses the facts in the crowd – except for that conga

Katharine Hepburn’s real-life affair with director John Ford adds extra spice to this tale of a fiery proto-feminist queen’s love for the Earl of Bothwell

Alan Rickman’s historical romance, about the landscape architect to the Palace of Versailles, is a limp, aimless film without any feel for 17th-century speech or manners

With narration that omits to mention Rhodesia’s African tribes in its population, things only get worse with Rhodes’ racist, imperialistic delusions masquerading as kindly paternalism