It’s funny how the awards circuit works these days.

For decades a film that won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival in September was automatically a major contender for year-end awards up to and including the Oscar for Best Picture. The 2014 winner, The Imitation Game, joined the discussion, but with the caveat in the blogosphere that it would face strong competition from the then yet-to-be-seen Unbroken and Selma, neither of which turned out to be an awards magnet. The Imitation Game fared better than those films, earning 8 Oscar nominations and a win for Best Adapted Screenplay, but faced tough competition from early year release The Grand Budapest Hotel, summer release Boyhood and New York Film Festival hit Birdman, which turned out to be the big winner.

The Imitation Game suffered in some quarters by comparison to the 1990s play and telefilm Breaking the Code based on the same book, Andrew Hodges’ Alan Turing: The Enigma, about the mathematician who developed the modern computer in 1936 and used a version of it to help break the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. Both versions of the book weave back and forth between Turing’s lonely childhood, his classified World War II service and his 1951 prosecution for indecency after being discovered in a compromising gay situation. The earlier version included several male-on-male love scenes not in the new film and an ambiguous ending suggesting that maybe Turing’s death was an accident rather than a suicide. Ironically that scene was also filmed for The Imitation Game but deleted allegedly because the filmmakers were afraid the partially eaten apple laced with cyanide looked like a commercial for Apple. Instead it ends with an inspiring final meeting between Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his friend Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) which leaves audiences warm and fuzzy.

The Imitation Game, though exciting and well-intentioned, is a good movie but it is not historically accurate. Turing himself was said to be outgoing and friendly and got along with everyone including his boss portrayed as a total jerk by Charles Dance. The character played by Cumberbatch more closely resembles his portrayal of TV’s Sherlock. The code breakers had no say about who lived and who died. That was all made up as was the story that one of them had a brother on a targeted ship. Turing’s computer was called “Victory”, not “Christopher” after his childhood friend. The whole subplot about spies at Bletchley Park was made up as was the plot about the police at first thinking he was a spy. He was, in fact, reported to the police for indecency when a failed attempt at blackmail went astray after his reported robbery. Turing’s court-imposed chemical castration, abhorrent on the face of it, nevertheless lasted a year, not two, had no visible signs of affecting his ability to continue his work and ended 14 months before his death so was not likely the direct cause of his death as the film’s end-notes suggest.

The film’s art direction, costume design and Alexandre Desplat’s score, composed in just three weeks between other gigs, are all first-rate as are the performances of Cumberbatch, Knightley, Matthew Goode, Allen Leach, Matthew Beard and others.

The Imitation Game is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include the deleted end scene and panel discussions with cast, director Morten Tyldum, and various producers and artisans.

Another of last year’s highly anticipated films, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, failed to be quite the blockbuster and awards magnet it was predicted to be, but did well enough with audiences and critics to be deemed a success. If the film has a flaw, it’s the more-than-3-hour running time it takes to tell the film’s story. A good half hour could have easily been trimmed without damaging the film’s structure.

Matthew McConaughey gives one of his best performances as the astronaut who embarks on a journey to save mankind, but one from which he may not return. Mackenzie Foy plays his daughter as a child, Jessica Chastain plays her as a young woman, and Ellen Burstyn plays her as an old lady. Because of the relativity of time in space, McConaughey doesn’t look much older at 124 than he did as a relatively young man at the film’s outset.

Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Matt Damon, Wes Bentley and Casey Affleck also have prominent roles. The film’s Oscar win for Best Visual Effects was well earned.

Interstellar is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

The critics loved Jean-Marc Vallée’s Wild, but I found it tedious.

Reese Witherspoon certainly works hard as the recovering alcoholic, drug abuser and sexually promiscuous woman who goes on a thousand-mile walk after the sudden death of her mother from cancer, but aside from the walking and the whining there isn’t much to the film.

Wild is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

This week’s best Blu-ray upgrade is Scorpion Releasing’s reissue of 1962’s David and Lisa.

Based on a true life case, Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin star as two mentally disturbed teenagers at a special school run by psychiatrist Howard Da Silva. He recoils from physical touch and she will speak only in rhymes. The film, though well regarded by critics across the board, benefitted from the protracted New York City newspaper strike at the time. Without newspapers to guide them, Time Magazine was the most prominent source for film reviews during the strike. It called David and Lisa the best American film of the year, leading to unusually strong box-office for an independent film. It ran for a year at New York’s Plaza Theatre and earned Oscar nominations for director Frank Perry and his wife Eleanor for her screenplay.

An insightful on-camera interview with Keir Dullea is included as an extra.

1969’s Alice’s Restaurant, based on Arlo Guthrie’s song, was very much a film of its time. It was a huge hit in its day and an Oscar nominee for Best Director, the acclaimed Arthur Penn who had previously been nominated for The Miracle Worker and Bonnie and Clyde. Today’s audiences don’t quite get it, which is a pity. Try and watch it with someone who was around at the time to explain the cultural references including the joke about getting one’s ass into Canada.

1960’s The Facts of Life received five Oscar nominations and won one for Best Black-and-White Costume Design for Edith Head. The Academy membership was apparently impressed that Lucille Ball could be made to look like a fashionista after a decade of playing a beloved plain Jane on TV. The film is one of those “they almost did it” retro comedies about a married man (Bob Hope) and a married woman (Ball) who fall in love while on a vacation without their respective spouses. It all ends without much having happened between them. That this largely unfunny script was nominated for Best Original Screenplay in competition with The Apartment and Hiroshima Mon Amour is itself a bit of a bad joke. Melvin Frank’s film is worth seeing only for die-hard Bob and Lucy fans.

Robert Siodmak’s 1945 film noir The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry provides bravura acting opportunities for George Sanders as a small-town milquetoast and Geraldine Fitzgerald as his manipulative sister who comes between Sanders and fiancé Ella Raines. Moyna MacGill (Angela Lansbury’s mother) has her most prominent screen role as Sanders’ older sister and the always reliable Sara Allgood plays their acerbic maid. The film is somewhat marred by its Woman in the Window ending, but not enough to quash its overall enjoyment.

This week’s new releases include A Most Violent Year and The Immigrant.