The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Enigma is not for the war buffs who want historical accuracy. Although the historical setting at the headquarters for code breaking during world war 2 is solid enough the characters we meet are fictional.The main character Thomas Jericho clearly has some connections to Alan Turing, but the differences are equally apparent to those who know the historical accounts, so anyone searching for a story about Turing should look elsewhere.If you can let go of this there is a good spy story to be had. Kate Winslet, Saffron Burrows and Dougray Scott are all excellent in the leading roles, but the supporting cast is equally good. Jeremy Northam's spy master is one of many highly entertaining portrayals.The intertwined stories along the way are perhaps more captivating than the main plot, but the ride we are taken on is well worth it.

Despite the assembled talents (Kate Winslet, Michael Apted as director, and Tom Stoppard as the scriptwriter), Enigma is far less interesting than "Breaking the Code," which featured Derek Jacobi as the real Alan Turing, and told the extraordinary story of how the British broke the German code in World War II with much closer adherence to the facts There's really no need for fictional romances to enhance this amazing tale, and Turing is a far more interesting character than his fictional counterpart.If you're looking for Stoppard's humorous touch, there's absolutely none of it here. Kate Winslet is a marvelous actress but she's given an extraneous role, and the real drama of the Enigma Machine is subordinated to a hokey plot. Here's a case where reality definitely trumps fiction.

I am very familiar with this story, as my mother-in-law worked at Bletchley Park as a cypher assistant during WW2. A fact she never revealed to us until 1990, as she respected the Official Secrets Act to the letter. I read Harris book about 2 years ago, and finally watched the movie this week. The real story of Alan Touring, and his colleagues at Bletchley, the building of "the bombes" and the critical role they played is a very compelling story in itself, and had the writers of this movie confined themselves to that, this movie would have been superb. Instead we got a load of the usual Hollywood claptrap of romantic sub-plots with Claire, and dead spy chasing rubbish. We are to believe that during the most critical stage of the U-boat war, and the massive effort to re-establish Shark, that the key man Jericho/Touring went chasing all over Scotland , to track down a traitorous ex-girlfriend. Lots of spare petrol in those days ( NOT). This undermined great performances from Dougray Scott who played the brooding , sullen and exhausted Touring, to perfection, and Kate Winslett, also Jeremy Northam . Still worth watching for their performances alone.

Not being familiar with the source novel but obviously aware of the involvement of industry heavy-weights like Tom Stoppard and Michael Apted, it was reasonable to expect that the satisfaction from this particular movie would be more cerebral rather than visceral. And what's wrong with that, to paraphrase Mr McCartney? That said, the movie has a density at its core which is hard to penetrate and is promulgated by a too-complicated plot and probably just too much dialogue.There's much to admire though, particularly in the cinematography and acting stakes. For the former, period is convincingly recreated, not least with some wonderful old cars running around country roads and especially with the massive code-breaking construct inside Bletchley, a juggernaut of dozens of clicking dials. I liked the acting too and even if Dougray Scott's accent sometimes drifts north from its supposed Yorkshire moorings, he displays no little range in depicting the damaged "genius" of the piece, this in the movie immediately following his pumped up appearance as a super-criminal in "MI2". Kate Winslet is also good, no air-brushing or Titanic ball-gowns here as she frumps up effectively as the "don't fancy yours much" friend of the captivatingly pretty Saffron Burrows' Clare who ensnares Scott's Tom Jericho in her machinations. Jeremy Northam is also fine as the smooth, double-talking investigator at Scott and Winslet's heels.On the debit side, the plot really is quite impenetrable with more convolutions than a convolution machine and which had my head spinning pretty well as much as the dials on the tracking equipment at Bletchley, but then it's well known that Mr Stoppard likes a puzzle or two. I'm all for keeping the audience hanging on every word but there are so many of them here that it's difficult to properly weigh up their significance in the context of the narrative. The few action set-pieces on board seem too detached from their surroundings to really engage and often seem like drop-ins, while the Scott/Winslet relationship seems to blossom unconvincingly from nowhere at all.However, it's fair to say, in conclusion, that this period thriller, while successfully recalling the depth and feel of British war-movies of the 50's, doesn't quite transcend that achievement and seems to lack fulfilment as a cinematic entertainment. That said, just how do you successfully dramatise as mundane and unglamorous a profession as code-breaking, so that overall, I'm bound to say this was a noble attempt and more than likely a film that will repay repeat viewings, to more satisfyingly uncover the myriad layers at its centre.