This film gets tremendous amounts of credit for being very real, and for Russel Crowe's supposed brilliant performance as the lead. I say these people are missing a few things. First of all, Crowe's role may not have been easy, but he certainly isn't masterful at it and is often either over-the-top or just not entirely credible and never seems completely "in" the film like some actors can make you forget they are paid actors with lives outside a film. Another thing is the film is very much a plain account, a mere biography, of some brilliant mathematician who had to struggle with severe schizophrenia. Nothing earth-shaking and not much to work with besides retelling the story, this film deals a lot with just events rather than a cinematographic interpretation of those events, and the parts that are indeed rendered movie magic are over-celebrated, emotionally void and subtlety-deprived moments that engage the audience forcefully with overdramatic music and classic thick cinematic methods rather than through a strength built through heart and genuine emotion. This film painfully lacks heart and an authentic atmosphere. It is just a mechanically carried out drama affair that collects gratuitous amounts of credit, it doesn't deserve. Hollywood in the works, industrially produced, executed and sold. No art or personal touch found here.