Turing Film News Stories
In late March, the Windy City Times featured an interview with Executive Producer Patrick Sammon, ahead of early April’s Chicago screening of CODEBREAKER.
A California LGBT magazine recently featured an article about CODEBREAKER. Chris Carpenter from The Rage described the film as “excellent and engrossing.”
Late last year, Executive Producer Patrick Sammon wrote a feature in Huffington Post about his reasons for making this film. Sammon wrote, ” It’s a sad story, but people should also be inspired by Alan Turing’s life. He was one of a kind.”
“To the Best of Our Knowledge,” a nationally syndicated radio show broadcasting on 180 stations in the US, recently focused on Alan Turing’s life and legacy. The August 19th program about Turing included a segment that highlighted CODEBREAKER, featuring an interview with Patrick Sammon, one of the film’s executive producers.
A pair of news articles in Ontario, Canada focused on CODEBREAKER ahead of a screening hosted by the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in June of 2012. TheRecord.com, which covers Kitchener & Waterloo, Ontario quoted Executive Producer Patrick Sammon in a story about the film, “It’s really one of the great tragedies of the 20th century,” said Sammon.
The Waterloo Chronicle features a column about CODEBREAKER with Marshall Ward writing that, “Turing’s life was so remarkable — and ultimately so tragic — I’m amazed it hasn’t been captured in a big screen documentary until this new film, Codebreaker.”
Newspapers in the United Kingdom provided extensive coverage in connection with the recent broadcast of “Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker” on Channel 4 in the UK. The news articles highlighted Turing’s story and our film’s approach to telling it. The papers featuring stories and reviews about the film included The Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Independent. Here are some of highlights from the coverage.
David Chater from The Times said, “Britain’s Greatest Codebreaker is an overdue and thoroughly honourable telling of this dreadful story…. As a general rule, dramatisations in documentaries are an embarrassment to be avoided, but these scenes are low-key and restrained and performed with an unflashy dignity. Not only does it tell a story that has shaped our lives, but it serves as a posthumous public apology for past acts of gross ingratitude.”
This film was the Critics’ Choice Pick of the Day on November 20th in The Sunday Times. “This docudrama takes a compassionate look at a pioneer,” writes Victoria Segal.
The Sunday Times calls the film “imaginative” in a review from November 27th.
The Sunday Times had a long feature story about Turing and the film on November 20th. “Turing’s life and untimely death are the subjects of a powerful television drama-documentary to be screened tomorrow night,” writes Michael Hanlon.
A review from Alex Hardy at The Times on November 22nd gives the film four stars out of five. “Many docudramas struggle to make their reconstructions any better than ‘not entirely naff’. Here they were sumptuous period pieces, enticing us into the past with vintage music, and into Turing’s viewpoint, with scenes richly scripted from his letters and diaries. Ed Stoppard was cracking in the lead role, especially towards the end, as the tortured man’s tears lingered just within his eyes.”
The Mail made this film its Pick of the Day on November 21st, giving it four stars out of five. The review said Turing’s life is “artfully explored.”
Nigel Jones from The Mail writes, “Turing is played in the film by Ed Stoppard, who twitchily conveys both his extraordinary mind and the agonies his unconventional ideas and lifestyle caused.”
The Radio Times featured an online interview with Ed Stoppard, the actor who plays Turing in this film. Read more.
Chris Harvey from The Telegraph calls the film “superb” in this story which features an interview with Craig Warner, the writer of the film’s dramatic scenes. Harvey writes, “Channel 4’s film reminds us that Turing’s death was an intellectual tragedy too; how many world-changing ideas were lost to us with his passing?” Read the interview.
A review from Sarah Cox from On the Box gave the film four stars out of five and said Turing’s life was “sensitively portrayed.” She said the film was a “truly awe-inspiring viewing experience…The intimate personal portrait of a man tortured by loss and isolation was carefully painted.” Read more.
