The Imitation Game: 'a bog-standard biopic, riddled with historical inaccuracies'

Great minds think alike. Focus Features' Oscar-bait drama for 2014 — about a prickly genius Cambridge grad who struggled through a traumatic personal life ("The Theory of Everything") — was rather similar to The Weinstein Company's contender, "The Imitation Game."

The latter looks at mathematician Alan Turing, known both for breaking the Nazis' Enigma code in World War II (a hugely important feat), and for his pioneering work in creating a theoretical construct for the modern-day computer. The twist, of course, is that Turing was a closeted gay man with top-level security clearance at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offense.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing as a tangled mess of off-putting aloofness, visionary intelligence and borderline Asperger's syndrome. Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) — the only woman on the code-breaking team — is the sole character who pulls him out of his brittle shell. While this duo make the film watchable, it remains a fairly bog-standard biopic, riddled with historical inaccuracies and outright fabrications, and any script that feels the need to repeat the same line three times to underline its theme deserves to be taken out back and shot. Then again, some people think "Interstellar" is a work of genius.