Danny Boyle’s Ink has premiered at the Venice Film Festival, giving audiences their first look at Guy Pearce as Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Adapted from James Graham’s award-winning play, the film goes back to 1969, when Murdoch bought struggling British newspaper The Sun and enlisted editor Larry Lamb, played by Jack O’Connell, to take on the market-leading Daily Mirror.

Claire Foy also stars as Jules Davies, a fictional journalist working at the paper as Lamb and his team pursue a new formula involving bigger headlines, sex, scandal and whatever else might get people buying.

Early reviews of the 116-minute film have been largely positive, with Ink sitting at 89 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes.

What critics say about Murdoch drama Ink

The Times of London awarded Ink four out of five stars, praising Boyle for taking Graham’s dialogue-heavy stage play and giving it a cinematic makeover. With flashbacks, flash-forwards and newspaper headlines flying across the screen, the review described Boyle’s approach as an “adrenaline overdose”.

The Irish Times also gave the film four stars, describing it as “dirty, gripping, enraging stuff”. Critic Donald Clarke praised Boyle’s retelling of a period in which British newspapers were rapidly changing, describing the film as a “rambunctious pageant” of the media’s loss of innocence.

There was plenty of praise for O’Connell, too.

Screen Daily described him as “magnetic” in the role of Lamb, calling the film a “seductive, high-energy portrait” of ambition and upheaval in the newspaper industry. Pearce and Foy were also singled out among the strong cast.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was similarly impressed, calling Ink “gripping” and “sizzling”, and O’Connell “superb”. His review praised the film for capturing the excitement surrounding Lamb’s transformation of The Sun, while also showing the human cost of the paper’s relentless pursuit of readers.

IndieWire gave the film a B, praising Jack O’Connell’s performance and the film’s breakneck energy, while finding Boyle’s approach at times overcooked. The review described Ink as a journalism thriller “tabloid-ready for our political apocalypse”, with its story of media, power and populism taking on added relevance more than 50 years after the events it depicts.

But not everyone was quite as enthusiastic.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the film three stars, describing Boyle’s treatment of the birth of The Sun as a “lurid tabloid frenzy”.

While O’Connell was praised as a terrific Lamb and Pearce plays Murdoch with surprising restraint, Bradshaw was less convinced by the inclusion of the real-life kidnapping of Muriel McKay, who was abducted after being mistaken for Murdoch’s then-wife Anna.

He questioned whether the much darker storyline fit alongside the film’s otherwise blackly comic treatment of The Sun’s rise.

That wasn’t the only criticism of the film.

The International Cinephile Society described Ink as “entertaining but shallow”, arguing the film gets so caught up in the excitement of Lamb and Murdoch’s revolution that it risks enjoying the ride a little too much.

But Boyle’s trademark frenetic style appears to have landed with plenty of critics, with Radio Times saying the director conjures the same sort of “fizz” he brought to Trainspotting three decades ago.

As for what Murdoch himself thinks of it all, that review is still pending.

Pearce revealed at Venice that Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth had told him her father was “very happy” the Australian actor was playing him.

There was just one catch – Murdoch hadn’t actually seen the film at that point.

Australian audiences can make up their own minds when Ink hits cinemas on January 7.