The Telluride Film Festival casts a wide net, as almost all festivals of its ilk do, but if it has had any speciality that stands out among many, it might be the well-earned tearjerker. There is as much crying at Telluride every year as there isn’t in baseball, but with the festival’s emphasis on top-line prestige fare, returning patrons look forward to going through some emotional catharsis in the mountains every Labor Day weekend. Among the 2026 lineup, probably no film got passholders any deeper in their feels than “Elsinore,” starring Andrew Scott and directed by Simon Stone. Their remarkable film dramatizes the true-life story of a well-known British actor — Ian Charleson, of “Chariots of Fire” fame — who died at the peak of the AIDS crisis in 1990, but who spent his last months and weeks staying alive long enough to achieve the life goal of playing Hamlet at the National Theatre.
There won’t be a dry eye in the house when this goes wide, as the cliche goes, but there also won’t be an untickled funny bone, given a performance by Scott that’s almost as drolly funny as it is passionate and heartrending (with no small help from writer Stephen Beresford). And there won’t be any un-warmed hearts among any viewers with a deep love for the life of the theater, since the movie serves as a love letter to stagecraft and community, on top of of most obviously being an ode to the seeming indomitability of Charleson as he bravely forestalled his final bow.
