The Imitation Game

During World War II, the eccentric, socially challenged math genius Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) leads a British cryptography unit charged with cracking Nazi Germany's Enigma code, a hitherto unbreakable cipher that has defied all efforts to unravel it. Graham Moore's script takes a few liberties with history, and his multiple-flashback structure is a bit awkward at times, but director Morten Tyldum smooths it all out into an expression of Turing's psychological complexity. Cumberbatch's masterful performance towers over the picture, but he has plenty of sturdy support—Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode and Allen Leech as co-workers, Charles Dance and Mark Strong as higher-ups, and (most especially) Alex Lawther as the teenage Turing, in a performance that complements and enriches Cumberbatch's own.