Telluride 2026 Takeaways: Julianne Moore, Nathan Fielder Oscars Launch

I half-believed it until a few hours later, waiting out my flight at Montrose, when I ran into Hiddleston on his way back to the U.K. He told the same story, unprompted.

That’s the festival. The Telluriders have gone home, Venice wraps in a few days and we came down the mountain knowing more about this Oscar race than we did going up. Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic “The Odyssey” is still the one to beat. It won’t be a cakewalk. Here’s what else I carried down.

“The Debut” handed Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti their moment.

Jesse Eisenberg’s third feature behind the camera premiered Saturday night. By the next day, it was the hottest ticket in town. “The Debut” drops Moore’s Mona, a meek suburban homemaker who lands a bit part in a community theater musical, into the front of the best actress race. It’s the funniest, warmest thing she’s done in years. Giamatti, whom Eisenberg calls his “favorite actor,” plays the tyrant director shaping her. During one rehearsal scene between them — a master-class, no other word for it — the Telluride crowd applauded in the middle of the movie. You rarely see that happen once at a festival. It happened again before the credits.

Nathan Fielder attempts the impossible.

The festival’s best-kept secret came Sunday night, when ticket holders filed into the Werner Herzog Theatre with their phones locked away for “You Can See Everything,” the Elizabeth Holmes documentary Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, whose narrative feature “Primetime” premiered in Venice a day earlier. Holmes invites Fielder and his skeptical crew to film her in the 34 days before she reports to prison. The shoot spirals into a three-year descent. Portions are recreated with an A-list actor who is eligible for Oscar attention, though not SAG.

“Club Kid” has a real play for the old guard.

By the end of the panel, it came down to one word, spoken loudly by Firstman: “love.”

“La Bola Negra” commands the room.

Respect is the currency at that altitude, and Los Javis have it. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi arrived off a Cannes run that ended with the directing prize, and the Telluride word-of-mouth only got louder. Chris Pine, Sofia Coppola, Rian Johnson and their Netflix stablemate Danny Boyle (“Ink”) all turned up for the screening.

Shot on 35 mm and inspired by the unfinished Federico García Lorca work of the same name, “La Bola Negra” moves across 1932, 1937 and 2017, tracing three generations of gay men through nearly a century of Spanish history.

Of the titles that ran the Venice-to-Telluride relay this year, Martin McDonagh’s landed with the most confidence. Searchlight Pictures’ “Wild Horse Nine” bowed in Venice competition on Sept. 3 to a 13-minute standing ovation, the Lido’s first real roar of the fall. Two days later, it turned up as Telluride’s surprise patron screening, timed to John Malkovich’s Silver Medallion tribute.

Malkovich was the biggest takeaway. Twice nominated and never a winner, he called the script the kind you see “every 25 years.” The double premiere vaulted him near the front of best actor, trailing only Matt Damon in “The Odyssey” and another Telluride player, Andrew Scott in “Elsinore.” Sam Rockwell, who won supporting actor for his last McDonagh outing, is back in that conversation, with the open question of whether Steve Buscemi joins him.

“Tender Loving Care” is Mike Leigh in a minor key, and it wrecks you anyway.

If this is the last Mike Leigh film, and the final shot plays like a man who knows it might be, it’s a hell of a way to leave. “Tender Loving Care” follows two social workers and was built the usual Leigh way: no script, no plot, just months of assembling people until they exist.

Paul Jesson gave the film its thesis in a single line, asking what a movie about caring for people means right now. “It’s also a good antidote to a world which, by and large, is being run by bullies and thugs,” he said. “The state of the world at the moment is pretty terrifying, really. A lot of people try to close their eyes, cover their ears and get on with their own private lives. And it’s hard to know what to do apart from that, other than look after the people they’re close to.” That’s the movie, and the campaign.

Everybody wrote a love letter to acting this year.

The gondola is the place to get honest polls.

Nothing tells you how ticket holders are responding to a movie like a gondola ride to or from the Chuck Jones Theatre. On a ride up Sunday morning, you get to listen to the festival unfiltered, which, of course, came with the secret screening speculation that swung from a Frank Ocean project to the eventual Fielder documentary. But then you get to hear about people’s reactions to the Bill Gates talk at Elks Park that half the car caught the tail end of, and the running argument over which “Martin McDonagh is the real Martin McDonagh.” (Whatever that means?)

However, he was less forgiving elsewhere about “Fjord,” Cristian Mungiu’s Romanian Palme d’Or winner. “I didn’t think there was any character work between the two of them [Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve]. I didn’t get their relationship at all,” he said. “They got these incredible actors and it didn’t just match. I wanted to hear more about their beliefs. I wanted to get more into it, be challenged more. It left me a little cold.”

Interestingly, I spoke to someone else immediately after getting off the gondola who said “Fjord” is the best thing they’ve seen this year.

The pendulum can swing rapidly between voters and titles.

Other notes from the mountain

(That’s also “A Long Winter” writer and director Andrew Haigh weeping alongside them)

Winfrey also threw a party, and by the chatter, all anyone could talk about was who got the invite, who didn’t and how you could possibly get one. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t one of them.