At mid and high frequencies film is superior. But the sensors used in digital cameras show greater sensitivity at low frequencies.
The dynamic range of the original capture medium is of greater importance than that of a scan or print.
Of course, film shines in the highlights, digital shines in low light conditions.
An interesting exercise is exploring high budget movie production, those reaching $200 million, and understanding when the cinematographer uses Vision 3 stock film or when he uses an Alexa digital camera.
Those cinematographers are not rookies, they are a kind of true artisits... they know exactly what they do and why they do it, and they master their tools. I'm fortunate to have a friend usually working as First Assistant Camera (Focus Puller) and I've got explained a bit how they make those decisions.
Today, being this one a digital world, what is clear is that if stock film is still used in some selected movies this is because several factors, and a principal one is highlight depiction. In cinematography (and sometimes in photography) shadows are way less important than highlights, we may want shadow detail, but many times we use shadows to clip distracting stuff, but highlights and glares (in cinematography) are always important to depict volumes, specially in the faces of the actors, creating a sense of reality and immersion that it would be challenging with digital capture. Still every day digital cameras for cinematography are better and the gap is narrower.
That friend working as 2nd assistant explained me many times that with digital captures illumination is way more critical than with film, once adjusted it can happen that the actor moves the face a bit in another direction than the exactly intended and the capture is bad, they may have many captures and the one with the good expression is not good enough. With film when the actors nail the role they are done, this saves money because the shooting time is shorter, they can focus in the important things, and all the captures in what the actors performed best are good. Also actresses feel themselves very beautiful in the scanned captures they may preview, so they are more self-confident. Film is film...