All the world’s a stage. The art of performance is directly unpacked in two of the more acclaimed films of the 2026 festival season, while a third film centers a dying actress while playing like an ode to the stage divas that have been so beloved for generations. One of them is among the best films of 2026 so far, while the other two reveal how even some of the best acting need the right formal choices around it to have the desired impact.
The best of the three is Jesse Eisenberg’s sharp “The Debut,” a movie that first plays like that episode of “The Simpsons” where Marge gets cast in a musical version of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” However, this is not the predictable “Star is Born” narrative that its previews and set-up might lead people to expect. As he was with his remarkable “A Real Pain,” Eisenberg is interested in something deeper, something that captures the complexity of acting in a way that we haven’t really seen before. While also being one of the funniest films of 2026, “The Debut” asks unexpected questions about what it really means to get lost in a character. There’s a reading of it that might even be anti-method acting. What if you get too lost to come back?
The core question of “The Debut” to this viewer comes down to a classic tenet of acting classes around the world. (FYI, this critic was a theatre major and director years ago, so I know my zips from my zaps and zops.) Every actor has been taught to bring themselves to their characters, finding sense memories or personal traits that can connect their actual lives to the fictional one they’re playing. At the root of “The Debut” is a captivating idea: What happens when someone has nothing to bring?
Julianne Moore does some of the best work of her career as Mona Friedman, a New Jersey housewife who auditions for a local play, Nosy Neighbors, which is an entirely original musical written by Eisenberg, who has somehow crafted original songs that sound completely genuine just to show how multi-talented he is. Mona competes for the part of Miss Danielle with none other than Bernadette Peters as the most famous actress in the New Jersey regional theatre scene, Serena Cherry. Of course, she doesn’t get it, but Serena leaves the show after a month, and, well, Mona was the only other person who tried out. Why not give her a chance?
Eisenberg sketches Mona’s homelife in ways that verge on satirical. Her husband barely talks to her; her twin children literally forget she exists. In one of Moore’s several heartbreaking beats, she tells a story about how she would go out to dinner with her parents and be left outside with the dogs. She’s been ignored her entire life. And so, the affection shown her by fellow actors (including Halle Bailey) feels like warmth to which she’s unaccustomed, and even the direction of the intense Jerry Blankenbuehler (Paul Giamatti) is attention she’s not used to receiving. He pushes her to bring something real to Miss Danielle, leading to a workshopping scene that’s so incredible that it has produced applause at fest screenings.
From here, you would think that “The Debut” is a story of a woman who didn’t know she was a star until she found her voice in the spotlight. It’s not quite that movie. Without spoiling, Mona gets lost in Miss Danielle in a manner that’s truly, hysterically unpredictable.
Everyone is good here—rarely has anyone been more perfectly cast than Giamatti—but Julianne Moore reminds one how undeniable she can be in the right material. This is the Moore of “Safe” and “Boogie Nights,” a performer willing to take incredible risks with a part that teeters between reality and caricature. What’s so impressive about “The Debut” and Moore’s work in it is that this is never a film that takes the easy route. Here’s where a critic would say something about how we can all see a bit of ourselves in Mona, but that’s not really what this movie is. We see Mona. It’s more complex, daring, and, therefore more rewarding.
The power of the stage is also central to the story of “Elsinore,” which captures the last months of the life of Ian Charleson, star of “Chariots of Fire,” played here with devastating honesty by Andrew Scott. After Daniel Day-Lewis walked out of a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre in 1989, director Richard Eyre (Johnny Flynn) tapped Charleson to replace him, not knowing that the London actor was dying of AIDS. Against the advice of his doctor (played by a subtly perfect Olivia Colman), Charleson insisted on taking the part, pouring everything he had left into arguably the best role an actor can ever play.
“Elsinore” works as a testament to Scott’s incredible range as a performer. He makes so many funny, moving, genuine choices as Charleson, refusing to play him as a symbol for how much we lost in the war on AIDS but getting to that point, nonetheless. It’s impossible to watch this film and not think about not only what Charleson might have gone on to do with his career but how many other masterpieces simply never happened because of this horrible disease. At its core, “Elsinore” is about what was “not to be,” a story of loss framed in that of an exceptional triumph.
Sadly, director Simon Stone doesn’t trust his audience, burying Scott’s breathtaking work in both one of the most aggressive scores of all time from Stefan Gregory and hyperactive editing by Valerio Bonelli. The last act of “Elsinore” is infuriating, even more so when one considers how Charleson complains about his career being defined by the unforgettable score of “CoF”. As Scott finally reaches his big moments on the stage, everything he’s doing is undercut by the form around him. Imagine the big emotional stage show of “Hamnet” quick-cut together with flashback beats from the rest of the movie and a score so loud that you can’t even hear all of the words being spoken. It’s so antithetical to the truth that Charleson sought through the immediacy of the stage and that Scott is so capable of finding through the camera.
Ultimately, Scott is so moving here that people will forgive how often the film works against what he’s doing, but they might not forget.
Finally, there’s a film that’s not directly about the theatre but comes from a theatrical love of the diva, nonetheless. Ryan Murphy regular Cody Fern makes his directorial debut with the interesting “Closing Night,” a movie with such old-fashioned degrees of melodrama that some people in Toronto compared it to Douglas Sirk. As a huge fan of Sirk, I pushed back because Fern doesn’t yet have that visual language—Sirk knew how to use color like no one else—but there is something to be said for a director who so clearly loves acting and actresses, using his production budget to elevate Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts, and Dianne Wiest with showy, meaty, memorable roles.
Co-written by Devon Bostick, “Closing Night” opens with the famed Broadway star Sandra Vale (Paulson) inviting her family to the opening night of her new play, a revival of Mother Courage. (Already this movie is so catnip to NY theatre lovers.) The problem is that Sandra hasn’t spoken to her estranged sister April (Watts) in years, the two torn apart by how one slept with the other’s boyfriend back when they were teenagers. April’s son Theo (Toby Wallace) has been secretly having lunches with Aunt Sandra as he prepares to start his own family with his girlfriend Lucy (Odessa A’zion). When Sandra is diagnosed with early on-set dementia, skeletons come tumbling out of closets, some of them put their by Sandra and April’s hysterically cynical mother Diane (Wiest).
With basically only five speaking roles and most of the film taking place in an apartment, it really feels like “Closing Night” could have started life as a play, where Paulson’s work might have won her a few awards. She is fearlessly driven here, chewing on Fern and Bostick’s caustic, wounded dialogue. As the film gets more maudlin in the final act, I missed that bitter interplay of the film at its best. I also wished the film had a stronger visual language to match its performers, but there’s something to be said for young creators who value the great actresses of film and television that came before. Murphy has long-done this in his TV work, and it’s nice to see Fern take that shared admiration to a cinematic platform. There’s every reason to believe the next film will be more visually and narratively ambitious. Let’s hope it also has a trio of actresses this willing to play to the entire house.
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