“Spying and novel writing are made for each other,” John le Carré once wrote. “Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and the many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.” Le Carré’s enigmatic gift as a writer wasn’t simply that he could draw on his experience of having once been a British spy. He brought a novelist’s eye into the secret world, and the habits of espionage to his writing. Far more than knowledge of tradecraft, this status—at once outsider and insider—enabled him to uncover truths about the corrupting nature of power: His novels are infused with the honesty of an outsider, but they could only have been written by a man who knows what it is like to be inside the tent.

In the worlds le Carré created, truths are rarely self-evident. So it was in his own life, as we learn in a recently published book of his letters. On the surface, he progressed naturally from his youth to the inner sanctum: His adolescence was spent in English public schools immediately after World War II, where the boys did military training in uniform, jingoism was the norm, and—at least for one final generation—empire was an inheritance. He studied foreign languages. He served in the British army’s Intelligence Corps. He attended Oxford. He taught German at Eton. By the time he joined MI5 in 1958, his biography read, well, like a lot of other recruits’.

The deeper truth is more interesting. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an inveterate con man, in and out of money and trouble with the law. His mother left them when he was 5 years old, so young David Cornwell, as was his birth name, was enlisted as his father’s accomplice. He entered the secret world early, engaging in deceptions on behalf of his father but also to protect himself against a man who drank, gambled, and wasn’t above beating his son. “Spying did not introduce me to secrecy,” le Carré wrote in his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. “Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood.”

His own service as a spy was short-lived—including a few years undercover in Germany with a cover identity as a junior diplomat in the early 1960s. Still, it was an auspicious and life-changing period. The Cold War was at its apex, at the moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and the Cuban missile crisis. Meanwhile, British intelligence was rocked by the revelation that it was harboring two high-ranking Soviet double agents: George Blake and Kim Philby. The British elite were scandalized. MI6’s networks were decimated. The British secret services were discredited in the eyes of the Americans.

During this period, Cornwell rose early and wrote three novels under the pseudonym John le Carré: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and, in 1963, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. This last book, which turns 60 this year, recast the Cold War: The conflict was not a morality play of good versus evil, as leaders of both sides presented it; rather, it was an ambiguous addendum to World War II waged by gray men in the shadows, broken by their own betrayals and the bureaucracies—capitalist and Communist—that treated them as expendable. The novel became a global best seller, making his (invented) name. In any case, David Cornwell’s career as a spy ended the year after his breakthrough novel was published: Philby, it is widely believed, blew his cover.

[Read: The singular achievement of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”]

For the rest of his life, he would be John le Carré the writer. Despite his accurate protestation that he “was a writer who had once happened to be a spy, rather than a spy who had turned to writing,” le Carré never really separated himself from his time on the inside. He was not a genre writer. He was motivated less by portraying cloak-and-dagger conceits and more by a searching need to understand the overreach of empires, be they British, Soviet, or American. He wove stories of how individuals and nations reveal themselves through the secrets they carry. In a way, every book he wrote is a symphonic variation on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold—in which a British agent poses as a Communist defector in order to take down a brutal East German foe, only to learn that his own service has betrayed him and the innocent are left to suffer the consequences. It is an unsparing look at the cost of moral compromise in pursuit of so-called national interests.

Two years after his death, we now have a voluminous collection of le Carré’s letters, assembled by his son Tim Cornwell and published late last year: A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré. Through his correspondence, we learn a lot about le Carré’s habits as a writer. There are literary feuds, frustrations with critics, and glimpses into how some of his books became successful film and television productions (and how some didn’t). Despite his success, you get the sense that le Carré never let go of his insecurities about being taken seriously as a novelist; we see him seeking—and reveling in—the approval of writers such as Graham Greene, Philip Roth, and Tom Stoppard. Clearly, he wanted to be known as more than a spy or a spy novelist.

There is less material that reveals le Carré’s secret lives. The correspondence during his time as a spy often reads like an opaque curtain veiling his cover—a litany of logistics and family updates. Le Carré had numerous infidelities during his two marriages, a habit that doubtlessly benefited from his experience in subterfuge. According to his son, le Carré “covered the tracks” of his infidelities—but there are occasional revelatory exceptions. “Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light,” he wrote in one letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964. “If you live, as I have, so long in the dark, you can’t always, if you are me, have faith in the light.” Clearly, le Carré felt the burden of living secret lives, which must have contributed to his capacity to conjure characters who feel the agony of betraying loved ones while hiding away their truest selves.

His letters also reveal a man who cared deeply about how his work was consumed by the wider world. In 1966, he wrote an open letter to a KGB-controlled literary journal that had critiqued The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. In it, he acknowledged drawing equivalences between the Soviet Union and the United States, but not between communism and Western democracy—the issue, instead, was how the West betrayed its own ideals in the methods it used to wage the Cold War. To le Carré, the real tragedy was the wreckage of human lives all around: “The problem of the Cold War is that, as Auden once wrote, we haunt a ruined century. Behind the little flags we wave, there are old faces weeping, and children mutilated by the fatuous conflicts of preachers.”

The letter can be read as a mission statement for le Carré’s politics at the time. Notably, though, it was published in Encounter, a magazine funded by the CIA—le Carré was expressing his outsider’s viewpoint in a publication that was very much a part of the inside, the same machinery that he was critiquing. This irony recurs in his letters: Le Carré repeatedly offers withering indictments of the powers he served, but he never seems to cast them aside. Later in life, he wrote nostalgically to Alan Judd, a fellow novelist who once served as a soldier and diplomat, of his time at MI5 and MI6: “I miss the Office … In a sense, they are the only places, apart from writing.”

Yet, in other places, he could be withering about the people who become spies, himself included. He explained himself to a friend who learned that le Carré spied on him at university: “I was a nasty, vengeful little orphan with a psychopathic liar for a father and a boy-scout self-image as an antidote.” The description is eerily similar to one le Carré offered of Philby in a letter to a journalist: Philby was “a nasty little establishment traitor with a revolting father, a fake stammer and an anguished sexuality who spent his life getting his own back on the England that made him.” But again, there’s that tension—le Carré was no romanticist for England, but he maintained a righteous rage at Philby for betraying it. Ahead of one of his trips to Russia, le Carré was approached about meeting Philby to hear his side of the story. Most writers would have jumped at the chance; le Carré refused.

What he did do was travel the world researching the settings, characters, and themes of his novels. Many of his letters testify to his doggedness. He pursues guides to far-flung places like a spy recruiting sources, and reports back his findings through novels—often by putting us inside the experiences of those on the wrong end of power. He understood this as a key to his own success—a mixture of empathy and exactitude—which depended upon other people trusting him. “Each novel I have written has been a complete life,” he writes to Vladimir Stabnikov, a Russian literary figure who was le Carré’s guide on trips to Moscow. “The novels I wrote about Russia were lives that you enabled me to lead. And when I moved on to other lives: to the Middle East, to Africa, and to Latin America, other people opened doors for me and I was again the beneficiary of kind strangers who became kind friends.”

Although he wandered widely, he returned—again and again—to the profession he knew best. He produced a shelf of books about a British intelligence service whose concerns mirrored the nation’s struggle to determine what it was without an empire. Many of his later books act as broadsides against an American national-security apparatus filled with the hubris of an empire that didn’t know it was hastening its own decline. To le Carré, this wasn’t just a matter of writing what he knew; these books were a useful vehicle for telling the stories he wanted to tell. “If you are a novelist struggling to explore a nation’s psyche,” he wrote in his memoir, “its Secret Service is not an unreasonable place to look.”

His letters reveal just how much the United Kingdom and the United States had let him down by the end of his life. “My response to the political scene is vehement,” he wrote to a journalist in 2018. “I hate Brexit, hate Trump, fear the rise of white fascism everywhere and take the threat very seriously indeed; the craving for conflict is everywhere among our pseudo dictators.” Shortly before his death, he sought and received Irish citizenship. Finally, a cord was cut. To an Irish bureaucrat, he wrote, “You have given me back my long friendship with Europe.”

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Terry Fincher / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty

In 2017, I finished eight years working at the center of American national-security policy in the White House. Exhausted by lack of sleep, haunted by world crises unresolved, disoriented at moving from the inside to the outside, and rattled by Donald Trump’s presidency, I sought out reasons to travel. In a bookshop in Hong Kong, I bought a set of le Carré’s first three novels—the ones written when he was on the inside. Near the beginning of the first, Call for the Dead, he introduces us to his finest creation, that owl-eyed observer within “the circus,” le Carré’s analogue for Britain’s secret services: George Smiley.

He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

I couldn’t stop reading. Here was a man working things out through his writing, trying to make sense of forces that could be soul-crushing—particularly, in this case, for people on the inside.

Something about being on the inside opened the floodgates that allowed le Carré to begin constructing his own canon. By the time I reached The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, I marveled at the immediacy with which le Carré was able to distill things that could never have been captured in an intelligence report or a diplomatic cable. Spies seek information to buttress national power; writers seek the truth of the human experience. Le Carré noted this reality in a 1974 letter to Graham Greene: On one of his many research trips, he traveled to Saigon toward the end of the Vietnam War. There, with the Vietcong winning the war, he reread The Quiet American, a 1955 novel that foreshadowed America’s defeat through a piercing story of American hubris. “The sheer accuracy of its mood, and observation, is astonishing,” le Carré wrote to Greene. Greene, like le Carré, had been a spy. Greene’s novels, like le Carré’s, convey truths that elude those who serve power.

[Read: John le Carré goes back into the cold]

On that trip to Southeast Asia, le Carré was researching what would become The Honourable Schoolboy, about a British agent named Jerry Westerby. In the process of unmasking a Soviet intelligence operation in Asia, Westerby’s loyalties shift from his government to a woman. Still, he does the work. Pulling a thread that leads him through war-ravaged Laos to Thailand, Westerby ends up at an American military base just as Saigon falls.

Le Carré describes an exhausted outpost of empire, a bookend to The Quiet American. Through Westerby’s eyes, we see how “a flow of air-force personnel was drifting in and out of the camp, blacks and whites, in scowling segregated groups … The mood was sullen, defeated, and innately violent. The Thai groups greeted nobody. Nobody greeted the Thais.” Westerby meets his contact, an American major drinking brandy while absorbing the news of his nation’s defeat. “I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir,” the major says to Westerby. “The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member.” Westerby, who has traded dreams of empire for the pursuit of love, responds cavalierly: “Proud to have you aboard.” Later, though, he takes in his surroundings with the eyes of a spy and the insight of a novelist: “This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost.”

In le Carré’s letters, he expresses flashes of anger at being slotted as either a Cold War writer or a former spy. There was, he knew, something more enduring about his work, even though it depended on the knowledge he’d acquired inside the secret tent: It was literature. So often, ambition in public life can be tethered to achievement in the moment—rising through the ranks, reaching the heights of bureaucracy or political office. But by melding his insider’s knowledge with his outsider’s perspective, le Carré ascended to a greater height. When empires die, the most powerful thing they leave behind are stories. David Cornwell told them.

Friends and relatives of Hong Kong model Abby Choi on Tuesday paid their final respects at the scene where police say they found what are believed to be the socialite's dismembered body parts, public broadcaster RTHK reported.

Chinese territory hopes the relaxation of its last coronavirus measures will lure back visitors and boost business.

Every Oscars season brings new surprises: first-time nominees, snubbed Hollywood veterans, a list of honorees spanning blockbusters to indies. But one kind of movie is always a contender: the biopic. A true-story film is one of the most reliable forms of awards catnip; seven of the past 10 winners for Best Actor in a Leading Role were nominated for their portrayal of a real figure, sometimes a well-known celebrity, such as Freddie Mercury or Winston Churchill. The movies housing those performances tend to be functional to a fault. But some biographical films break the form and attempt something artistically challenging while also telling their protagonist’s story. Here are 20 of my favorites.

Tick, Tick … Boom! (2021, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda)

Jonathan Larson’s musical Tick, Tick … Boom! was autobiographical when he first performed it in 1990. But the version that Miranda brought to screens more than 30 years later is even less coy about the fact that the central Jon character is Larson, while conceding that the story depicted is true “except for the parts Jonathan made up.” Tick, Tick … Boom! is about Larson (played by Andrew Garfield) striving to break out in New York’s theater scene, but it’s more broadly a work about the tricky act of balancing ambition and sanity in the arts world. The film acknowledges that Larson tragically died before receiving wide recognition for his musical Rent, but that’s part of what makes Tick, Tick … Boom! such a compelling watch: Miranda pairs that sad awareness with the vibrant, yearning energy of Larson’s original text.

Neon Films

Shirley (2020, directed by Josephine Decker)

Another biopic that mixes fiction with fact, Shirley is a portrait of the author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), set around the time she was writing her second novel, Hangsaman, published in 1951. Decker’s dreamy film sees a married couple arrive at Bennington College and get sucked into Jackson’s tempestuous relationship with her preening husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg); together, the two writers are an entrancing nightmare—Shirley’s alcoholism and agoraphobia clash with Stanley’s philandering and social pomposity. Moss’s performance is particularly energetic and raw, representing both the haunted nature of Jackson’s storytelling and the author’s own troubled life.

A Hidden Life (2019, directed by Terrence Malick)

After several years spent working on abstract projects such as Knight of Cups and Song to Song, the philosophical maestro Malick turned his attention to a real-life subject for his next film: Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis for refusing to swear an oath to Hitler after being conscripted. It’s a Malick movie, so A Hidden Life is filled with striking scenery and a voice-over narration questioning the relationship between God and man, between free will and fate. Malick’s ongoing fascination with the natural world, which he can represent better than practically anyone, is paired with stunning imagery of storm clouds gathering and the industry of war corrupting the peaceful Austrian mountains. Still, the personal fortitude of Jägerstätter (August Diehl) is the film’s strongest element.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019, directed by Marielle Heller)

Adapted from an article written by the Esquire journalist Tom Junod, Heller’s film takes a clever approach to depicting the children’s-TV host Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks), whose life and perspective on entertainment has already been well covered in documentaries. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood instead stars Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel, a journalist assigned to profile Rogers who’s initially unconvinced of his subject’s genuine goodness. Heller understands that many viewers might be similarly skeptical that Rogers was as saintly as he appeared, so Vogel plays the role of the cynic, an embittered reporter trying to uncover Rogers’s dark side while also coming to terms with his own personal struggles. Hanks’s performance is beatific, but also a little weird. Though Heller is firm in portraying Rogers’s powerful and therapeutic aura, she also grasps how unnerving it might have felt to be in his presence.

[From the December 2019 issue: My friend Mister Rogers]

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First Man (2018, directed by Damien Chazelle)

It’s obvious why it took so long to make a definitive film about Neil Armstrong, whom Ryan Gosling portrays in First Man. The astronaut was taciturn, nervy, and intensely private, and the stakes of the Apollo 11 mission, which every viewer knows will be a success, aren’t especially dramatic. But Chazelle’s brilliance comes from digging into how unknowable Armstrong was, even to his close friends and family, and how desperately tense so much of the Apollo program was despite its eventual triumph. First Man is stressful, often frustrating, and then deeply moving in its final act on the moon, which was particularly incredible to view on an IMAX screen.

A Quiet Passion (2016, directed by Terence Davies)

Terence Davies is kind of a specialist in biographical films about poets, which is to say he’s made two of them (the other, the Siegfried Sassoon–focused Benediction, is also worth a watch). His methodical storytelling approach is a perfect match for Emily Dickinson, whom Cynthia Nixon plays as much more complicated than her reputation as an inscrutable recluse. Davies portrays Dickinson’s slow withdrawal from public life over the years, starting with her time as a whip-smart teenager at a Christian boarding school, and moving on to her navigation of family drama and her challenges to the religious hegemony of the day. A Quiet Passion conveys the fractured, piercing nature of Dickinson’s poems, illustrating her creativity while avoiding clichéd scenes of her sitting at a desk pondering what line to write next.

Jackie (2016, directed by Pablo Larraín)

The Chilean filmmaker Larraín’s recent output has mostly concentrated on true stories; one of his best films, the Oscar-nominated No, dramatizes Chile’s national 1988 referendum on whether the Pinochet regime should stay in power. Of late, he’s moved on to portraits of powerful women that mix fact with imagination, including 2021’s divisive Spencer and an upcoming Maria Callas film starring Angelina Jolie. Jackie is the best example of his style: Natalie Portman portrays Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination in a film that explores the narrative she created about her family and the darker truths nested within it. Larraín’s mournful vision is meditative and at times nightmarish, but even the most abstract material is anchored by Portman’s self-aware, imposing performance.

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Steve Jobs (2015, directed by Danny Boyle)

Many biopics cleverly zero in on a specific moment in a subject’s life, picking a story that represents their wider impact on history. Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin and based on Walter Isaacson’s biography, adjusts that tendency by focusing on three major launches during the Apple founder’s life: the first Macintosh computer, his Apple rival NeXT, and the famed iMac. This brilliant meta-structure captures the boom-bust-rebound cycle so familiar to the tech world, and Sorkin’s gift for blending exposition with witty banter brings those action-packed segments to life. It’s an astounding portrayal of a figure whose charisma and prickliness existed side by side, with Michael Fassbender doing bravura work in the lead role.

Mr. Turner (2014, directed by Mike Leigh)

Mike Leigh has a particular creative process for his films, in which he improvises scenarios with his cast and builds out the story with them instead of writing a traditional screenplay. Many of his movies are more mundane slice-of-life dramas, but this approach works surprisingly well for biographical stories, lending a sense of authenticity to films such as Topsy-Turvy (about the musical-theater duo W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan) and Peterloo (about a notorious massacre of protesters in 1819 England). Mr. Turner might be my favorite of Leigh’s period biopics: It delves into the life and works of the brilliant but cantankerous artist J. M. W. Turner, whose impressionistic landscapes were decades ahead of their time and thus both celebrated and decried. Timothy Spall is wonderful and belligerent in the leading role, but the film is an unflinching look at life with an artist whose genius is inseparable from his personality flaws.

Paramount Pictures

Selma (2014, directed by Ava DuVernay)

Selma, a thunderous historical drama that made DuVernay one of the most discussed directors of the decade, tackles a monumental subject with grace. The film depicts Martin Luther King Jr.’s role in organizing the Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights marches of 1965. David Oyelowo is perfectly pitched in the lead role, capturing all of King’s charisma without overwhelming the ensemble. But Selma is also a story of community-based political progress, rendering the backroom meetings and widespread activism that laid the groundwork for the landmark protests. DuVernay’s camera remains intimate throughout, relying on close-ups to keep the real-life figures feeling, well, real, instead of like the formal portraits that viewers might know from their history books.

[Read: From Selma to Black Power]

The Wind Rises (2013, directed by Hayao Miyazaki)

As a historical narrative, The Wind Rises is only vaguely rooted in truth. Its protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, was a real person, the designer of Japan’s Zero fighter planes and other aircraft used during World War II. But the story is partially fictionalized, blended with details from The Wind Has Risen, a novel about a man contending with his fiancée’s tuberculosis diagnosis. The great Japanese animator Miyazaki seems to insert this personal plotline as a way of imagining the kind of work-life conflict Jiro likely faced, torn between his calling and his home, a challenge Miyazaki himself has said he wrestled with. But the film is driven by an even knottier moral dilemma: the idea that one’s creations are being used for evil. Jiro’s passion for creating beautiful aircraft is equal only to his horror at the fact that his designs support machines of death and warfare. The Wind Rises is a knotty, spiritually conflicted work, and maybe the most complicated effort of Miyazaki’s storied career.

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The Grandmaster (2013, directed by Wong Kar-wai)

The Grandmaster dramatizes the life of Ip Man, a revered martial artist who trained many future stars, most famously Bruce Lee. Directed by the leading Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, the film features the frequent Wong collaborator Tony Leung in the lead role and is steeped in both history and philosophy. The Grandmaster moves through Ip Man’s adolescence, early training years, marriage, and navigation of major events such as the Second Sino-Japanese War and the 1951 closing of the border between Hong Kong and mainland China. The film is a lavish production, and multiple versions have been released—including a very streamlined American cut that tries, clumsily, to provide further context for international viewers—but the 130-minute “Chinese Cut” is the one worth seeking out.

Bernie (2011, directed by Richard Linklater)

True crime is a subgenre that can be given to lurid controversy. But Linklater’s retelling of the 1996 murder of the Texas multimillionaire Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine) by her far younger companion, Bernie Tiede (Jack Black), is downright whimsical. There’s no mystery to the murder itself, which Tiede commits after his relationship with the unpleasant and demanding Nugent breaks down; Linklater is far more interested in the aftermath, when local townspeople start rallying to Tiede’s defense because of their hatred of his victim. Linklater places some of the real-life residents alongside professional actors, lending verisimilitude to the proceedings. Black gives one of the best performances of his career, bouncing off Matthew McConaughey, who plays a frustrated district attorney.

Moneyball (2011, directed by Bennett Miller)

Maybe the best sports movie of the 21st century is about an executive: Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, who used advanced statistics to spin gold from one of the smallest budgets in Major League Baseball and stay ahead of his richer competitors. Adapted from Michael Lewis’s book about the team’s 2002 season, the film turns a data-driven quest into a war with the hard-bitten classicists of America’s pastime. It’s a compelling portrait of a divorced, aloof, intensely stubborn person who sometimes feels at odds with the sport he loves. Miller understands that the tension between change and tradition is what makes baseball such a uniquely American topic.

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Bright Star (2009, directed by Jane Campion)

Like Terence Davies, Campion has directed multiple excellent biopics of poets and writers, and her 1990 film about Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table, warrants a look. But Bright Star might be her most singular work in a career filled with idiosyncratic triumphs. It tracks the last three years of the brief life of John Keats (Ben Whishaw), focusing on his romance with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a woman who inspired some of his verse but whom he could not marry because of his lack of income. Bright Star is swooningly romantic and deeply tragic, steeped in Whishaw and Cornish’s natural chemistry and Keats’s connection to the natural world; it’s a heartbreaker of a film, but a worthy one.

I’m Not There (2007, directed by Todd Haynes)

While making a biographical movie about Bob Dylan, Todd Haynes seemed completely aware that the task before him—or at least any conventional approach—would be impossible. So he instead presents six short story lines that take on specific aspects of Dylan’s life or personality. Different actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Whishaw) portray the singer in some form or another. Blanchett’s performance as Dylan the mid-’60s folk rebel, spikily razzing the press about his switch to the electric guitar, is probably the best-remembered section. But Ledger’s work as Dylan around the time of his famed breakup album, Blood on the Tracks, is among the best of his sadly short career.

[Read: The rock band that redefined counterculture]

Marie Antoinette (2006, directed by Sofia Coppola)

For her follow-up to the Oscar winner Lost in Translation, Coppola tackled a difficult subject: the French queen Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), whose reign before the French Revolution was famed for its debauchery. Coppola’s take has a modern sheen, featuring a pop soundtrack and a cast of actors who mostly use their natural American accents. It’s also tinged with sympathy, noting the Austrian Marie’s alienation from her husband, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), and from the strange French court she was shipped to at the age of 14. The film is so light and fizzy that it seems to almost forget how badly things will soon start to curdle—but the lack of self-awareness is, of course, part of the point.

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The Insider (1999, directed by Michael Mann)

Mann’s other biographical films are the fascinating yet challenging Ali (2001) and Public Enemies (2009), and he has another one, about the carmaker Enzo Ferrari, due out this year. But The Insider is probably the best biopic he’ll ever make. It fictionalizes the story of the whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), who exposed a company’s secret efforts to make cigarettes more addictive. Al Pacino plays Lowell Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer trying to coax Wigand to make his claims public, and Mann gives their relationship operatic force, turning a story about good, hard journalism in drab offices into an entrancing visual marvel.

Nixon (1995, directed by Oliver Stone)

Stone has made many films about real-life figures, and his relationship to the truth has long been blurry at best. Alexander, his epic about the Macedonian conqueror, is his most formally daring work, but Nixon might be my personal favorite. Anthony Hopkins plays Richard Nixon in a film that takes a sweeping look at the disgraced president’s life and career. Though Stone is obviously politically opposed to Nixon, he seems to still feel deep sympathy for the complex, aggrieved outsider who struggled with personal demons and the grim circumstances of his impoverished youth. Nixon is also crammed with the kind of conspiratorial thinking about the U.S. government that suffuses many a Stone film, but that tone suits its protagonist, as he descends into paranoiac anger and the Watergate scandal erupts around him.

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Bird (1988, directed by Clint Eastwood)

Eastwood has made several movies about real, ordinary folk who emerge as heroes, such as Sully and Richard Jewell. But his masterpiece of the biopic genre is Bird, an offbeat account of the life of the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker). Mimicking the improvisational structure of jazz, Bird is a montage that jumps forwards and backwards in Parker’s life. Across timelines, it’s most interested in his relationship with his wife, Chan (Diane Venora), and fellow musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Red Rodney. Whitaker’s performance is extraordinary, and Eastwood’s experimental approach is too.

Choi's ex-husband and former in-laws have been charged in connection with her murder.

Four members of the same family charged in connection with the gruesome killing of Hong Kong model Abby Choi appeared in court Monday, after police said they found what are believed to be parts of her dismembered body, public broadcaster RTHK reported.

Police in Hong Kong said Saturday they have arrested three people following the discovery of the dismembered body of model and influencer Abby Choi.

Government says it will issue vouchers worth 5,000 Hong Kong dollars to all adults this year to help economic recovery.

Standard Chartered is going on a hiring spree in Hong Kong this year, in a sign of renewed confidence in its biggest market as the city reopens its border with mainland China.

Debate over discrimination against Mandarin speakers in the city has been reignited following an influx of visitors from mainland China, with a viral video stoking ...