The Imitation Game (2014)
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AUDIENCE SCORE
Critic Consensus: With an outstanding starring performance from Benedict Cumberbatch illuminating its fact-based story, The Imitation Game serves as an eminently well-made entry in the "prestige biopic" genre.
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Cast
as Alan Turing
as Joan Clarke
as John Cairncross
as Detective Robert Nock
as Stewart Menzies
as Peter Hilton
as Hugh Alexander
as Commander Denniston
as Jack Good
as Sergeant Staehl
as Superintendent Smith
as Charles Richards
as Young Alan Turing
as Christopher Morcom
as Helen
as Sherborne Student 1
as Sherborne Student 3
as Joan's Mother
as Teacher
as Headmaster
as MI6 Agent
as Margaret
as Electrical Assistant
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Critic Reviews for The Imitation Game
All Critics (253) | Top Critics (50) | Fresh (229) | Rotten (24) | DVD (1)
The "action" here is Turing tinkering with his machine. Or simply thinking -- which, as Cumberbatch portrays it, is adventure of the highest order.
We go into a movie knowing that the subject was as genius or a hero, a martyr or titan. We should leave with a more nuanced understanding of who he was, his complexities and flaws.
This film about one of the past century's smartest humans at times treats its own audience like a classroom of remedial learners.
It's a film about drive, about imagination, and how brilliance thrives outside the mainstream. These are common enough themes given uncommon purchase in a film about a man who likely saved millions of lives by never fitting in.
[Cumberbatch's] whose portrayal of the British mathematician and WWII code-smasher is a feat of nuanced intelligence, a portrait of anguish with hints of arid humor. And, yes, arrogance.
Produced with a Masterpiece Theater eye for period detail, but also with a missionary's zeal to honor a wrongly dishonored man.
Audience Reviews for The Imitation Game
The dialogue is wonderfully snappy, but the problem with Benedict Cumberbatch playing fundamentally unlikeable characters is that, well, he plays characters that are fundamentally unlikeable. Still, a great film for the progressive cause.
Super Reviewer
Benedict Cumberbatch swings for the fences in this mere thumbnail sketch about the pressures surrounding the Brit professor guy who was primarily instrumental in breaking the secret Nazi war codes during WW2. Oh ... AND HE WAS GAY (!!!!!), and that's what this film is really about, his successes despite some considerable persecution. So its a message film, yes, but with high production values.
Super Reviewer
I don't know how closely the movie follows real life, but this movie is like Alan Turing himself - a mix of intelligence, oddness, humour, despair, etc.
Super Reviewer
The Imitation Game Quotes
| Alan Turing: | Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine. |
| Alan Turing: | Of course machines can't think as people do. A machine is different from a person. Hence, they think differently. The interesting question is, just because something, uh.. thinks differently from you, does that mean it's not thinking? Well, we allow for humans to have such divergences from one another. You like strawberries, I hate ice-skating, you cry at sad films, I am allergic to pollen. What is the point of...of... different tastes, different... preferences, if not, to say that our brains work differently, that we think differently? And if we can say that about one another, then why can't we say the same thing for brains... built of copper and wire, steel? |
| Alan Turing: | Machines can never think as humans do but just because something thinks differently from you, does it mean it's not thinking? |
| Alan Turing: | Was I God? No. Because God didn't win the war. We did. |
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