The Man Who Knew Infinity

Srinivasa Ramanujan's life has long been one of the great stories in the history of science: a largely self-taught clerk from southern India whose letters to Cambridge contained results that leading mathematicians could barely follow. Matt Brown's film, adapted from Robert Kanigel's 1991 biography and premiered as a Gala Presentation at Toronto in 2015, brings that story to the screen as a classical British period drama, with working mathematicians including Ken Ono advising on the equations.

Dev Patel plays Ramanujan with a quiet, burning conviction, a young man who experiences mathematics almost as revelation and cannot understand why others demand proofs. Jeremy Irons is G. H. Hardy, the brilliant, emotionally guarded Trinity don who recognises his genius and insists on rigour; their relationship, prickly and gradually tender, is the heart of the film. Toby Jones adds warmth as Hardy's collaborator J. E. Littlewood, with Stephen Fry and Jeremy Northam among the Cambridge establishment and Devika Bhise as Ramanujan's wife Janaki, left behind in Madras. The film is at its best in its rooms and cloisters, where the drama of ideas plays out in chalk and correspondence.

Critics were divided on its conventional shape but warm towards its performances, and audiences embraced it as a rare film that takes mathematics seriously as a subject. Irons and Patel make it a moving portrait of intellectual friendship across the divides of empire, class and temperament.