
And on that night, at least, manipulation had never felt so welcome.

It’s not an unintelligent film by any extent. It does what it needs to do, goes where it needs to go, evokes the emotions it needs to evoke, and does so without ever testing our intellectual limits. Imagine my relief, therefore, at The Imitation Game, which is about as formulaic a drama as they come.

The night before a screening of The Imitation Game, I’d seen Alejandro González Iñárritu’s manic, “single shot” Birdman, one of those experimental movies that pushes unrelentingly at the boundaries of modern cinema and, in the process, leaves us exhausted without quite knowing why.
