ELSINORE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Opening Night Gala

I had expected ELSINORE to contain a great performance from Andrew Scott. I had NOT expected it to be part of a great film. Maybe that’s just years of underwhelming London Film Festival opening night films. They tend to be British, “heritage”, earnest and po-faced. And the plot summary - CHARIOTS OF FIRE actor Ian Charleson achieves his dream of playing Hamlet at the National Theatre despite dying of AIDS - suggested that this film might also fall into mawkish mediocrity. 

But ELSINORE is just a superb film! Brilliantly, darkly funny from start to finish. Scabrously British in its biting wit and affectionate use of mockery. And yet also genuinely affecting while never being emotionally manipulative. Screenwriter Stephen Beresford (PRIDE) knows just how to show us courage and joy and love and grief without ever bowing to trite clichés. And my goodness does he have a cast to deliver that range of emotions. Andrew Scott - who has himself delivered a widely acclaimed Hamlet on the London stage - gives the performance of his life as Charleson and one that is rightly being spoken of as an Oscar-contender. He is ably supported by a large cast. The standouts for me are Peter Mullen as Charleson’s father and Monica Dolan as the hilarious stage door manager at the National. And my goodness how delightful to see Juliet Stevenson on our screens again. 

But this isn’t simply a movie that works as a talky script to showcase performances. For a movie basically set in a flat, an NHS clinic and the National Theatre, director Simon Stone really gives us a visually arresting film. He shoots the National to make it a kind of self-contained protective city or community within itself. I really felt I had a sense of its internal layout and architecture - as if I had been taken into the Company. Further, cinematographer Mike Eley shoots many of the major emotional beats with almost claustrophobic close-ups that give us the full power of Scott’s performance.  

Most of all this is a film that while - yes - about death and the cruelty of a generation of young men taken from us - is also about a life lived with purpose and even joy - and the community who rallied round and made that happen. It’s a film about found family and actual family - the power of art - and human decency. And yet - to its great credit - it is never pompous. What a beautiful delicate balance to have achieved. 

ELSINORE has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2026 and will be released in the USA on November 20th.

JAY KELLY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 3

JAY KELLY is a film with a simple and arguably trite message: those who pursue success at all costs end up not alone but lonely.  Inevitably, when it comes to movie stars, the cost is paid by wives and children.  It’s ground that we have seen trodden from 81/2 to ALL THAT JAZZ and countless films in between.  Trite, but also relatable.  Every parent who has had to take a business meeting or a business trip and missed their kid’s school concert can empathise. Everyone who has reached a certain age and looks back on decisions that seemed like they weren’t even choices at the time, but are bitterly regretted in retrospect, can sympathise. So this is a strange film that seems obvious but somehow hits home.  I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes on occasion, but in the end the characters, and the central love story, really stuck with me.

George Clooney stars as the eponymous ageing film star whose mid-life crisis is triggered by a trio of guilt-inducing events. First off, his old mentor and movie director (Jim Broadbent) dies - a man that Kelly abandoned when he fell out of fashion.  Second, Kelly runs into an old fellow acting class student, played in youth by The House of Guinness’ Louis Partridge and as an old man by The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup.  That student had a lot of talent but ultimately was too nervous to ace the audition that Kelly ultimately won.  The resentment lingers.  Third, Kelly has to confront his woeful relationship with his two daughters when his youngest leaves for a European vacation.  The eldest (Riley Keough, superb in a cameo) feels her abandonment as a child keenly, and that relationship feels the hardest to fix.  But both young women seem refreshingly grounded.

So we think this is a movie about family, and I guess it is.  And let’s not pretend that Jay is going to fix 35 years of bad choices over a long weekend in Italy.  But the movie wants us to realise that he’s not the only one. Every member of his team, but principally his agent (Adam Sandler) and his publicist (Laura Dean), are putting their lives on hold to minister to his every need and enable his success.  One by one this movie strips him of their comforting support blanket. I am not sure if there is any major character development or revelation.  But a near-final scene of surprising tenderness between Sandler and Clooney shows the real danger of believing that you have chosen a family above your own.  The movie title tragedy is Jay’s but the real tragedy is his agent’s. 

Overall, JAY KELLY is a deceptively slow-moving gentle comedy that hits harder than you might realise on a first watch.  It does not contain the visceral anger of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s MARRIAGE STORY, but in working with debut feature writer Emily Mortimer, Baumbach has created something more melancholy and wistful, despite the brilliant cheesecake gags.

JAY KELLY is rated R and has a running time of 132 minutes. It played Venice, San Sebastian, Telluride and now London. It opens on November 14th in cinemas and on December 5th on Netflix.