"Despite being undoubtedly the most hated of all film genres, the biopic has endured since the very beginning of cinema. A review of the biopic of Alan Turing, The Imitation Game (dir. Morten Tyldum 2014), sums up the general contempt for the genre itself: "sometimes it feels like a line is being crossed. I really wasn't sure which side I was on with the Turing movie-certainly knowing how much was wrong with it was damaging to my enjoyment of it, but did that make it bad art? In the end I think it did because it was all just so unnecessary and generic, and so persistent...Good acting, direction, sets etc....though" ("Two NYRB Essays"). Biopics are routinely dismissed as bad art, shallow, formulaic, inauthentic and disrespectful of history. Among the biopic's many decriers are film critics, literary scholars, historians, politicians, journalists and anyone wedded to the notion that portraits of individuals should be "true" to life. But as the reviewer of The Imitation Game begrudgingly admits, these films are often very watchable, essentially due to the performance of the lead actor"-- |