Alan Turing is the perfect subject for a good old-fashioned movie biopic. There’s wartime intrigue, stormy personal drama, a man working against the odds, a man seen as an eccentric, plenty of modern day relevance and a sense that the film is making up for an injustice. Turing’s work at deciphering the most bafflingly coded German military radio transmissions during World War II was so important to the Allies and so ingenious that it was kept confidential for decades. His work was a secret weapon best kept that way. Winston Churchill himself sang the most lavish of praise for his efforts. Turing never fired a bullet, never flew a plane, never bled and never got a speck of foreign mud on him, but he was a war hero in his own way, in a laboratory, building a room-sized machine that’s come to be credited as an early computer. He’d die in obscurity in 1954, not even famous enough to be considered forgotten and under persecution for homosexual activities. This movie version of the story—its primary, screen-credited resource being the Andrew Hodges book—gives it the stately treatment. It hits grand notes and plays the audience like a violin. It skimps on the science for the human drama, which is understandable (this is a movie, after all, not a college textbook). Like most biopics, this leans heavily on the lead actor’s performance and Benedict Cumberbatch knows what he’s doing. He has the tricky task of making Turing an awkward alien who barely knows how to behave among other people, but still magnetic. Director Morten Tyldum steers us into humor in the right places and wisely teases out the mystery of what makes Turing tick. The film’s biggest flaw is that it often reduces its themes to aphorisms that get repeated multiple times in case we missed the first two utterances (I rolled my eyes at a few of these). Its strength is that it’s an absorbing piece of work that holds you to the end and makes you want to read further.