Hollywood vs. history: a lot of this year's hit movies have tackled real-life events. Two New York Times film critics consider how to watch a 'historical' movie.

• Author: Dargis, Manohla
• Position: MEDIA

Hollywood is called the Dream Factory--not the Truth Factory--for a reason. But this year, some of Hollywood's highest-profile award-winning movies--Lincoln, Argo, and Zero Dark Thirty--have been subjected to intense fact-checking from journalists, politicians, and commentators.

Among the complaints: Connecticut's four congressmen did not vote against the 13th Amendment in 1865, as shown in Steven Spieiberg's Lincoln. Iranian Revolutionary Guards did not chase a plane carrying six American embassy workers down a Tehran airport runway in 1980, as they do in the climax of Ben Affleck's Argo, which won the Oscar for best picture.

These historically informed movies are not documentaries, but they have a veneer of authenticity. Zero Dark Thirty begins with audio taken from real phone calls made from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Argo includes archival images of President Jimmy Carter and Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

In a work of imagination drawn from real life, it's hard to know where to draw the line between acceptable invention and irresponsible fabrication. Even historians know that all facts are subject to interpretation.

Lincoln portrays President Lincoln's struggle to get the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, passed by Congress in the waning days of the Civil War. The film's placement of Connecticut's congressional delegation on the wrong side of history has upset some residents of that state. Other critics of Lincoln say it turns the history of freeing the slaves into the story of a heroic white man, ignoring any role blacks played in their own emancipation.

The Hunt for Bin Laden

The most serious controversy has surrounded Zero Dark Thirty, which depicts the C.I.A. hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Critics have pointed to its embellishments and accused its director of endorsing torture. There's a lot of ambiguity in the historical record, some of which remains secret, making it difficult to say for sure whether torture yielded useful intelligence in the hunt for Bin Laden. What is known is that the C.I.A. used interrogation techniques like waterboarding * on some terror detainees as depicted in the movie's early scenes.

In Zero Dark Thirty, these techniques lead indirectly to finding Bin Laden. But senators from both parties and journalists with deep expertise on the subject insist that this is false.

If Zero Dark Thirty has been singled out for harsher condemnation, it's partly...