Excellent Screenplay, Good Acting

Rating: 8/10 (23 May 2015)

I personally like movies that have a lot of scale to them. So at this years Academy Awards ceremony I was kind of upset when just about all of the movies nominated seemed to be smaller budget productions. I of course had not yet seen The Imitation Game.
I will start by saying that this movie was well deserving of an Oscar win for best screenplay. By the end of the movie you find yourself really feeling for the main characters and the important place they played in history. So the scale that I usually look for in terms of size of a movie's budget was achieved by this movie in terms of the way this group of people affected so many lives in World War 2 and still to this day.
The acting in the movie was just terrific. Keira Knightley was her usually charming self (have I ever mentioned she was the real star of Pirates of the Caribbean). Mathew Goode was also solid in a supporting role. But as expected it was Benedict Cumberbatch who really brought the movie to life. Always perfectly subtle in his roles. he perhaps more than any other actor currently in Hollywood is fit to play a role of a man who at times seems trapped inside his own head. He brings humanity to a role that in many ways is a depiction of a person who seems more like a machine than a man.
In the end, with a great screenplay, excellent performances by the strong cast and with immense historical perspective, this is a movie that everyone needs to watch.