Telluride 2026: New Movies Starring Andrew Scott, Julianne Moore, and John Malkovich Anchor This Year’s Likely Oscar Contenders

Fall film festivals launch a panoply of rich film fare into the Oscar maelstrom. Venice opened Wednesday with Danny Boyle’s Fleet Street drama “Ink” (Netflix), starring Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch. And on Thursday morning, the 53rd Telluride Film Festival at last revealed its much-discussed lineup of more than 60 features, shorts, and revivals, which plays out over the Labor Day weekend (September 4 – 7). (And, unusually, Werner Herzog will not fly to Telluride from Venice with his latest film, “Bucking Fastard.” The film will play without him.)

He’s often among the Telluride regulars who assemble each year to enjoy the Rocky Mountain summer-camp vibe. Muppet scion Lisa Henson is throwing a party, and so are Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (Marshall will show his latest music doc, “Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes”). Ryan Coogler, Jason Reitman, Kenneth Branagh, and Ken Burns are also coming back.

New to the Telluride crowd are top executives from Apple TV and Disney. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro is supporting Searchlight’s “Wild Horse Nine” and NatGeo’s “Everest: The Other Side,” while Apple TV+ content czar Eddy Cue accompanies another Everest movie at Telluride: mountaineer and documentary director Jennifer Peedom’s fictional “Tenzing” (Apple TV), starring Willem Dafoe and Tom Hiddleston.

Oprah Winfrey is mounting an intimate gathering to support Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s “Everest: The Other Side,” about her Telluride friend, climber Jim Morrison, and his attempts to not only ascend Everest, with climbing partner and filmmaker Chin, but be the first to ski down its North face. “She fell madly in love with what he has to say about resilience and adversity,” said festival director Julie Huntsinger on a phone call. “She champions him whenever she can. Could anything surpass [Best Documentary Oscar-winner] ‘Free Solo’? This for me is a maturation. Jimmy comes to the fore in this film.”

Films vying for awards have increasingly, under Huntsinger, turned Telluride into an Oscar bellwether. Last year after Telluride, “Hamnet,” “Bugonia,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Blue Moon,” and “Frankenstein” went on to Oscar contention, while Cannes prize-winner “Sentimental Value” built up steam for its eventual Best International Feature Oscar win. Other movies that failed to gain traction in the mountains: “Jay Kelly,” “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” and “Ballad of a Small Player.”

Tom Hiddleston and Genden Phuntsok in ‘Tenzing’Courtesy Apple Studios

As usual, some of this year’s award season crop will world premiere in Venice before jetting into Telluride, including Telluride veteran Danny Boyle’s Fleet Street drama “Ink” (Netflix), starring Jack O’Connell as the high-flying editor of tabloid The Sun and Guy Pearce as empire-builder Rupert Murdoch. Back in 2008, Boyle premiered eventual Oscar-winner “Slumdog Millionaire” at Telluride.

Martin McDonagh’s spy comedy “Wild Horse Nine” (Searchlight) is an acting showcase for John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as two jaded CIA spooks; Malkovich gets one of three Telluride Tributes this year. “There’s something so right about this performance,” said Huntsinger. “It’s a function of where he is in his life, his age [72]; he’s so at ease and comfortable — and his rouche hilarity and wisdom.”

The others include British auteur Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers,” “45 Years”) who will show “A Long Winter” (Mubi), a deep-woods survival tale starring Kit Connor and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. “He gets this extra love out of his actors,” said Huntsinger. “Every one of them.”

At Berlin in February, the festival director started thinking about a tribute for the Best Actress winner Sandra Hüller, who starred in Markus Schleinzer‘s gender-bending German period drama “Rose,” then in May, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cannes director co-winner “Fatherland,” and of course blockbuster “Project Hail Mary.” “This is an incredible year for actresses,” said Huntsinger.

Other Cannes titles include A24 breakout “Club Kid,” likely Spanish Oscar entry “La Bola Negra” (Netflix), Cristian Mungiu’s divisive Palme d’Or winner “Fjord” (Neon), starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, two Léa Seydoux films, “Gentle Monster” (Netflix) and “The Unknown” (Neon), as well as Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Chabrol thriller “Minotaur” (Mubi).

‘Fatherland’Courtesy Mubi

Debuting in the mountains is “Elsinore” (Focus), featuring a performance from Andrew Scott as a dying thespian that is already yielding raves. (Scott could finally land his first Oscar nod.) “It’s so heartbreaking, and so beautiful,” said Huntsinger. “I sobbed.”

Also premiering are Mike Leigh’s likely last movie “Tender Loving Care” (Bleecker Street), starring “Widow’s Bay” breakout Kate O’Flynn, and “The Debut” (A24), Jesse Eisenberg’s much-anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-nominated “A Real Pain,” starring Julianne Moore as a tentative stage actress trying to meet the demands of her director (Paul Giamatti). “With each film, [Eisenberg] takes another step forward,” said Huntsinger. She also booked Bleecker’s “The Liberation,” from auteur Guy Nattiv, starring Carrie Coon as an uptight banker who joins a feminist cult, leaving her family behind.

One movie Huntsinger fought hard to get was James Gray’s Cannes entry “Paper Tiger,” starring likely Oscar contenders Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. After a long negotiation, Neon finally opted to go with the New York Film Festival opening night. “Tom Quinn knows how useful we are in the contender dance,” said Huntsinger, “but he [went with] opening night of New York. It was hard. It broke my heart a little bit. And James really wanted to come. He was trying to think of all these ways that he could still screen it here.”

‘Elsinore’Anthony Dickenson/ © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC

Huntsinger never expected to be dealing with a major mudslide that buried one of the festival’s main venues, The Palm, in three feet of mud. “I’m telling everybody it’s definitely that El Nino year,” she said. “It’s going to be rainy more often than not. When somebody sent me the video from the school as it was happening, my tummy fell all the way down to the soles of my feet, and I thought I was going to vomit. We worked with the schools to help them get the chair replacement to the front of the line in getting the purchases going. There’s no carpeting in the lobby. Certain drapes are removed. There’s no carpet in between the aisles of the seats.”

For those who don’t care about the breaking fall titles, Telluride always offers plenty of classics. Guest curator Rebecca Hall has programmed Charlie Kaufman’s little-seen “Synecdoche New York,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. And there’s an outdoor screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in Elk’s Park, under the stars.

What’s tough about Telluride is making choices. For the regular passholders, which theater line will most likely guarantee them a spot inside? (Many get left behind in favor of patrons.) And for a player like Kathleen Kennedy, will she pick Saturday’s A.I. panel, a subject dear to her heart, with Social Dilemma’s Don Harris, infinite scroll inventor Aza Raskin, and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky — or go to Oprah’s party?

THE SHOW lineup is below:

“Long Winter” (d. Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2026)

“Act 3” (d. Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor, Ireland/U.K., 2026)

“Alpha Gang” (d. David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, U.S., 2026)

“Avedon” (d. Ron Howard, U.S., 2026)

“Bucking Fastard” (d. Werner Herzog, Ireland/U.S., 2026)

“Burgundy” (d. Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, France, 2026)

“Carl Sagan: We Are Made of Star Stuff” (d. Nanette Burstein, U.S., 2026)

“Club Kid” (d. Jordan Firstman, U.S., 2026)

“The Debut” (d. Jesse Eisenberg, U.S., 2026)

“The Disciple” (d. Joanna Natasegara, U.K./U.S./Morocco, 2026)

“Elsinore” (d. Simon Stone, U.K., 2026)

“Everest: The Other Side” (d. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, U.S./China/Nepal, 2026)

“Fatherland” (d. Paweł Pawlikowski, Poland/France/Germany/Italy, 2026)

“Fjord” (d. Cristian Mungiu, Romania/France/Norway/Sweden/Denmark, 2026)

“Gentle Monster” (d. Marie Kreutzer, Austria/Germany/France, 2026)

“The Idiot(s)” (d. Małgorzata Szumowska, Michał Englert, Poland/Germany, 2026)

“Ink” (d. Danny Boyle, U.K./U.S./France, 2026)

“La Bola Negra” (d. Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo, Spain/France, 2026)

“The Liberation” (d. Guy Nattiv, U.S., 2026)

“Making Marie Antoinette” (d. Sofia Coppola, Italy/U.S., 2026)

“The Man I Love” (d. Ira Sachs, U.S., 2026)

“Minotaur” (d. Andrey Zvyagintsev, France/Germany/Latvia, 2026)

“My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile” (d. Julia Loktev, U.S., 2026)

“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (d. David Greaves, Liani Greaves, U.S., 2026)

“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” (d. Noah Segan, U.S., 2026)

“Pete Townshend: Behind Blue Eyes” (d. Frank Marshall, Nigel Sinclair, U.S./U.K., 2026)

“Rehearsals for a Revolution” (d. Pegah Ahangarani, Czech Republic/Spain, 2026)

“Rose” (d. Markus Schleinzer, Austria/Germany, 2026)

“The Row” (d. Bryan Fogel, U.S./Australia/Ireland, 2026)

“The Story of Documentary Film” (d. Mark Cousins, Scotland/U.K., 2026)

“Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing” (d. Erik Shirai, U.S./Japan/U.K./Denmark, 2026)

“Tender Loving Care” (d. Mike Leigh, U.K., 2026)

“Tenzing” (d. Jennifer Peedom, U.S./Australia, 2026)

“The Unknown” (d. Arthur Harari, France/Italy, 2026)

“Wild Horse Nine” (d. Martin McDonagh, Chile/U.S., 2026)

Also playing in the main program are two newly restored features: “Begotten” (d. E. Elias Merhige, U.S., 1989/2026) and “Beau Geste” (d. Herbert Brenon, U.S., 1926), with live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin; short films: “A Song for the Snow Lion” (d. Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan/U.S., 2026), “A Dance Through Time” (d. Sarah Gavron, U.K., 2026), “Maybe Tomorrow” (d. Wafa Mustafa, Waad Al-Kateab, U.K., 2026), “Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon” (d. Bill Morrison, U.S., 2026), “Love, Rendered” (d. Liz Garbus, U.S., 2026), “The Revolution Against Death” (d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Sweden, 2026), and Ben Proudfoot’s “The Buffalo Miracle” (U.S., 2026) and “Witt v. Air Force” (U.S., 2026).