Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turning, a genius who has trouble interacting with other people. Sound familiar? It is quite a different performance from Sherlock though. The comparison is only there to show how well he does with this sort of role. It's a very strong performance. There's Kiera Knightley too and she's as good as I've ever seen her. Charles Dance plays an entertaining foil and Mark Strong is an MI6 agent overseeing Turing's work. There's a group of others working with Turing, lead by Matthew Goode's character who are all solid. This isn't an ensemble though. It's the Alan Turning story and Cumberbatch is fully able to carry that workload.
Plot: It's told in three time periods: Alan's childhood, during WWII, and after the war. Alan's childhood tracks his friendship with a boy at his boarding school. After the war follows a police investigation into what Alan is hiding. The bulk of the movie is during the war though. Alan shows up to a military facility to get assigned to a project solving a puzzle: the German Enigma machine, which the Germans use to code all their messages. He takes over and reassembles a team and builds a machine to decode Enigma. You can Wikipedia how that goes if you want. It's one of those movies in which years of work is condensed down to two hours, so there's epiphanies and dramatic moments all over that may have not played out that way really, but it's all to service the story.
Elephant in the Room: What was Alan hiding? Turing was homosexual in an age when that was illegal and barbarically treated in England. As much as the movie is about Turing's significant contributions to the development of modern computers it's also about how it didn't matter to the laws of the days. It's a pretty tragic that one of the great minds of the 20th century got persecuted as he did.
To Sum Things Up:
This is Oscar bait in the best meaning of the phrase. It's a World War II underdog story about a man who is different from others. It has high highs and low lows. Cumberbatch and Kinghtley are deserving of any accolades they get and, even though the script is a little emotionally manipulative at times, I don't care, because it worked too well enough of the time.
Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend
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