THE IMITATION GAME

The Imitation Game is a 2014 British-American historical thriller film about British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, a key figure in cracking Nazi Germany's Enigma code that helped the Allies win World War II, only to later be criminally prosecuted for his homosexuality. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, Keira Knightly as Joan, and is directed by Morten Tyldum with a screenplay by Graham Moore, based on the biography Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.
     Cumberbatch's performance is awesome. He plays complex Turing with sensitivity, arrogance, a brilliant mind, and total autism in his relationships with his colleagues. 
        I'm not a fan of  Keira Knightly and I'm not sure how true the character of Joan is in the Turing story, but she is convincing as his fiancé willing to put up with Turing's homosexuality in order to  save him from criminal conviction and to enable the work of cracking the enigma code to continue. He knows it won't work. 
         There are really touching flashbacks to his childhood at boarding school, where he suffers horrendous bullying, has a close friendship (his only friend) with Christopher, who later dies of TB. Turing names the machine he creates after his friend. Later, it is called the Turing Machine, the first computer.
         Turing and his team crack the German's Enigma code, with 180 million million possible settings during the war but it was kept a secret as it was feared that the Germans would quickly invent another code just as impenetrable. In the process many lives were sacrificed to win the war. The team used calculus to help the War Office devise a strategy that would not raise the German's suspicions. It is said that cracking the Enigma code shortened the war by two years and saved 14million lives.
        Sadly, a few years after the war, Turing was convicted of indecent behaviour, and instead of prison was offered hormone treatment to cure his homosexual tendencies. This led to his eventual suicide. The Enigma code remained a secret for 50 years.

  Very highly recommended, The Imitation Game is on General Release now.