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Heavy Rain gets my vote for trying to push the acting part (at least what I've seen so far) harder than the above-mentioned photorealism attempts. As an aside, Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) was the first game i've seen in ages to try to turn a gameplay experience into something more akin to participatory theater (and be somewhat successful at it), and Heavy Rain looks to go further in that direction.

I actually think video games are a more forgiving medium for attempts at photorealism: The artificial action of trying to control an onscreen character with a couple of knobs and buttons (or keys, as the case may be) sets you up to expect something a little less than real. Also, the general level of realism seems to stay within a certain range across PC and console games, setting you up to expect a certain level of unreality.

In cinema, real actors are the norm, and so photorealism is much harder to get audiences to fully accept. Yes, a film like Beowulf pushes the bar for computer animation, but it's still clearly animation.

I would argue the most convincing photorealistic animation yet made is Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Then again, the animators essentially worked right on top of an actor's performance, almost like applying a layer of prosthetics. Having the actor in the scene adds veracity to both the performance and the animation, since otherwise the animators are working from scratch, and might otherwise miss a lot of the subtle visual cues from a physical performance. So why not do more of this? Instead of sticking an actor in a sound booth to mouth lines, why not put them in mo-cap suits and funky makeup, shoot them on a greenscreen stage, and have animators add to their existing physical performance?
[ edited 06 Nov : 23:42 ]

That's exactly what they did with Andy Serkis and Gollum in Lord of the Rings and I think it turned out great. There was even talk of Oscar nominations for that combination of acting performance and technology, but unfortunately the Oscars had no place set aside for "virtual" actors. Too bad... Serkis did a fantastic job.

Serkis did do a great job, although if I remember correctly, he was mostly in takes other than the ones that were actually used, so he mostly was a live action reference that also was for the actor's benefit. Even if that was the case, though, it's still a huge positive step towards making human/CGI interactions believable.