Andrew Scott delivers a career-defining performance as Ian Charleson in "Elsinore," which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, dramatising the true story of the Scottish actor who insisted on playing Hamlet at Britain's National Theatre while dying of AIDS. Directed by Simon Stone from a Stephen Beresford screenplay, the film avoids conventional biopic territory to focus instead on Charleson's final act of artistic defiance, offering a rare and inspirational take on a story from the AIDS crisis that resists the genre's usual bleakness.

Charleson, known for roles in Best Picture winners "Chariots of Fire" and "Gandhi", stepped into Hamlet after Daniel Day-Lewis abruptly quit the production, and went on to complete 24 performances despite full-blown AIDS and chemotherapy, against medical advice; he died aged 40, seven weeks after the run ended. The film, praised for its editing by Valerio Banelli and production design recreating the National Theatre, also touches on the parallel debut at Telluride of "Into the Breach", a documentary on the National Theatre's history co-produced by Kenneth Branagh featuring Judi Dench, Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman.