Enigma

A World War II analyst at England’s top-secret Bletchley Park (Dougray Scott), still getting over a nervous breakdown, works on breaking Nazi U-boat codes while probing the disappearance of his former lover (Saffron Burrows), aided by the missing woman’s roommate (Kate Winslet). Adapting Robert Harris’ best-selling novel (a fictional story with a real-life background so classified it was hushed up for 30 years), writer Tom Stoppard and director Michael Apted produce a thinking-person’s spy drama, uneventful on the surface but cerebrally tense. Scott makes a brooding antihero, alternately sympathetic and exasperating, his disheveled distraction contrasting with Winslet’s prim efficiency. Jeremy Northam, as a saturnine spy-master, steals most of his scenes and lends the film a welcome sardonic wit.