Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Imitation Game

One of history’s greatest inventors and mathematicians, Alan Turing, led a complex, devastating life. In Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, Turing’s life is explored through his attempts to crack one of the greatest cyphers in human history, the Enigma Code.

Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a strong performance in the early minutes of the film, making Turing’s abashed, egotism feel human. From there, he slowly develops a confident, but depressed figure struggling to overcome his debilitating introversion while developing a machine that will help him break the enigma code and will form the foundation for modern computing.

Strong support comes from Keira Knightley as the young, intelligent woman who will become his key assistant and later wife, and Matthew Goode as the affable, but suspicious lead of the Enigma Code team. Tyldum’s direction of the first two-thirds of the film is strong work even when dealing with a thoroughly traditional biopic narrative.

The film doesn’t quite handle the post-World War II scenes where Turing combats police who want to find him guilty of something, suspicious when he’s not particularly concerned about a robbery at his home. This segment leads to a post-trial series of scenes that are heart-breaking, but clunky resolution that’s summed up by title cards over the destruction of all data regarding the Enigma team’s success. While I’ve never been a fan of pre-credit historical wrap-ups, this film does well in its descriptive and contempt-inducing examination of what the British government did to someone whose impact on modern society was immeasurable.