Scott plays the Scottish actor Ian Charleson as he prepares for the 1989 National Theatre production of Hamlet. Charleson, best known for his 1981 role as the Olympic athlete Eric Liddell in the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire<\/a>, was seriously ill with Aids at the time. He died in January 1990, soon after completing the run.<\/p>\n Hamlet is famously a tragedy of self-doubt, and Elsinore thus lifts the conventional biopic contrast of public triumph with private tragedy by demonstrating the potential of drama to both express and elevate reality. Through his transcendentally emotional performance, Scott reveals an actor at the top of his game. Expect tears.<\/p>\n The festival\u2019s closing gala The Debut<\/a> provides a fitting bookend, with Jesse Eisenberg\u2019s comedy of a timid housewife who belatedly finds her voice when auditioning for a community theatre musical.<\/p>\n Where Elsinore finds the tragic parallels between stage and life, The Debut offers the pleasures of theatre\u2019s consoling fantasy. The film\u2019s star, Julianne Moore, conveys the subtle gradations from fragility to strength in her character\u2019s onstage transformation into a woman about to take control of her life.<\/p>\n The relationship of art to reality has a more political significance in another of the festival\u2019s triumphs, La Bola Negra<\/a>. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi\u2019s historical drama weaves together three timelines revolving around a frustrated playwright who has been left a mysterious document in the will of his estranged grandfather.<\/p>\n The film shifts between this story and that of his grandfather\u2019s experience as a somewhat reluctant fighter for the fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, and then to a visualisation of a lost work, La Bola Negra, by gay socialist poet and playwright Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca<\/a>. Regarded as modern Spain\u2019s most influential literary figure, the poet and dramatist was killed at the age of 38 by the fascists at the beginning of the war.<\/p>\n As well as historical periods, the film interweaves feelings of political commitment, queer desire, and poetic imagination, thereby intermingling visions of better futures, past possibilities, and the danger that we might lose what we hold most dear. <\/p>\n Behemoth!<\/a> was one of the festival\u2019s big Hollywood premieres, starring Pedro Pascal as a professional cellist and oddly passive Lothario. Its classical music milieu recalls 2022\u2019s T\u00e1r<\/a>, but Behemoth! is both far straighter and less weighty.<\/p>\n I enjoyed it as a film whose real star is its eclectic collage of musical genres that give rhythmic propulsion to its tale of an admittedly listless protagonist undergoing a midlife crisis. Although Pascal is the star, the show is stolen by an uproariously unhinged performance by Olivia Wilde.<\/p>\n Critics gave unanimous praise to Carol Morley\u2019s semi-autobiographical depiction of post-punk Manchester, 7 Miles Out<\/a>. But they reserved unanimous disdain for Klara and the Sun<\/a>, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro\u2019s speculative meditation on companionship, mortality and robot intelligence. Director Taika Waititi made the, shall we say, brave decision to translate the source novel\u2019s compassionate understatement into whimsical farce, eschewing its sensitivity without any discernible gain in humour.<\/p>\n A few other films I found disappointing suggest a difficulty that contemporary culture has in narrating its own origin. One of these was Ink<\/a>, Danny Boyle\u2019s adaptation of the stage play charting the first year of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s acquisition of The Sun newspaper.<\/p>\n This was undoubtedly a fateful moment in the making of modern Britain, but the film\u2019s hyperactive visual style fails to make up for its attention deficits as it skirts everything from the decline of deference to the sexual revolution, trade union power, the morality of sensationalism, demagogic populism and a kidnap plot that merits a separate film of its own.<\/p>\n Such confusion also mars Primetime<\/a>, a dramatisation of NBC\u2019s reality series To Catch a Predator and its unscrupulous quest for top ratings. <\/p>\n Much slower than either of these, but also failing to live up to its own self-importance, is Fjord<\/a>, Cristian Mungiu\u2019s Cannes winner about a Romanian family that emigrates to Norway only to find their conservative religious beliefs punished by the self-styled liberal state.<\/p>\n A few films got the balance between dramatic depth and political breadth right. One is Artificial<\/a>, which casts Andrew Garfield in the role of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, portraying him as an evil schemer who sold artificial intelligence to the devil. <\/p>\n Another is Wild Horse Nine<\/a>, a fictional black comedy from Martin McDonagh set in 1973 in pre-coup Chile. The plot revolves around a dysfunctional couple of CIA agents taking part in covert US operations to destabilise the Allende government. Played by Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, the bickering agents take a trip to Easter Island so the elder of the pair can see the stone heads<\/a> before he dies. <\/p>\n
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