Einstein and Eddington

Einstein and Eddington is a British television drama about the relationship between Albert Einstein, a German physicist still largely unknown at the outbreak of the First World War, and Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist who recognized the importance of his ideas. Eddington has recently been appointed director of the Cambridge observatory and is asked by Sir Oliver Lodge to study the work of a German scientist whose theories challenge Newton's long-established account of gravity. Despite the hostility between their countries, the two men begin an exchange of letters, and Eddington comes to see Einstein's work as a new way of understanding space and time. The film moves toward the 1919 solar eclipse, when Eddington leads an expedition to the island of Príncipe off the West African coast to test the theory through observation.

Philip Martin directed the film, which followed his 2004 drama Hawking and preceded Mo, The Forger and Scoop. Peter Moffat wrote the screenplay, and the cast includes Andy Serkis as Einstein, David Tennant as Eddington, Rebecca Hall as Eddington's sister Winnie, Jim Broadbent as Sir Oliver Lodge, Richard McCabe and Patrick Kennedy. It is a co-production between HBO Films and British companies, made for television rather than cinemas, and runs 93 minutes.

The film received a positive but not unanimous response. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.2 from around 8,500 votes, while on TMDB the rating is 6.8 from a much smaller number of 163 votes. The gap between the two reflects the limited size of the TMDB sample more than a clear difference in reception.