The Imitation Game (2014)

Benedict Cumberbatch is so good as the eccentric British hero Alan Turing.  His stutters and mannerisms convince the audience that he is playing a true genius.  After doing a little research on Turing, I appreciate the little details included in his characterization that I otherwise would have ignored (For example, he was an avid runner in real life).  Turing was not the only person facing discrimination; Keira Knightley's Joan Clarke is a fellow outcast whom Turing befriends.  Knightley leads a fabulous supporting cast working in ultra secrecy during WWII.  Praise to the production design team for depicting the reality of wartime Britain.

This story is an important one that needs to be told to recognize these war heroes' massive achievement in computing history.  There were some parts in the subplots that went by so quickly that I failed to understand what happened.  As I later read, the subplots are partially fictitious.  The screenplay does a good job of strategically tracing three key periods of his life to highlight his closeted homosexuality without undermining the central war part of the story. The movie also attempts to explain Turing's famous Imitation Game and some of the mechanics behind his decoder.  Perhaps the ideas are too difficult for the common audience to understand, but I think we could have benefited from a little more detail about how the machine actually worked.