‘Unbearably sexy in his rodenty way’: Benedict Cumberbatch’s 20 best films – ranked!

Benedict Cumberbatch as the persecuted mathematician, Alan Turing, in 2014’s The Imitation Game. Photograph: Black Bear Pictures/Allstar

20. The Roses (2025)

Benedict Cumberbatch does his considerable best opposite the equally prestigious Olivia Colman in this souped-up marital-breakdown dramedy, essentially remade from the 1989 movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. This time, though, it’s all about the Britons – indicating the supposed classiness of the affair. But the film is overwrought and unconvincing; it never convinces us that the couple were once passionately in love and now passionately in hate. The below-par script has the effect of bringing out an unrewarding kind of coldness in Cumberbatch, technically assured though he always is.