2025 Telluride Film Festival Recap: The Films, the Drama, the Parties, the Oscars and Oprah
The Telluride Film Festival is a bit of a fever dream. No matter where you’re coming from, the path to the quaint hamlet high up in the mountains of Colorado is a trek. Planes, trains, automobiles and more guide you to the yearly destination where filmmakers and film lovers intertwine like the building blocks of DNA. But at just three days, the feeling of getting your bearings and settling in is right when it’s time to wake up because it’s over just as quickly. But then, there’s something even more magical about the briefness, like an affair to remember.
The inner turmoil of the heads of the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals is a tale as old as time. Fighting for world premieres and talent, Venice’s Alberto Barbera, Telluride’s Julie Huntsinger and Toronto’s Cameron Bailey all want to give their festival audiences the best in show and all on top of each other or back to back. Sometimes that means absconding with some previously announced world or North American premieres as was the case this year when Telluride scooped up the pair of Sony Pictures Classics films A Private Life (which had world premiered at Cannes in May) with Jodie Foster and Blue Moon (a Berlin premiere) with Ethan Hawke. For Hawke, he received one of the festival’s silver medallion tributes. For SPC, their yearly three-hour sit down dinner party would have been a bit bleak without those two films and indeed, Foster and Blue Moon director Richard Linklater held court at the 221 Oak St. event.
The Venice Film Festival was so mad at talent making the fast jump from Venice to Telluride they literally held planes at the airport to prevent several members of the Jay Kelly crew from leaving. George Clooney did not make the trip to Telluride in support of his film due to a worsening sinus infection that had also kept him out of the Venice press conference for the film earlier in the week.
One thing about Telluride, while films are the raison d’etre, the parties — often stacked on top of each other — are where it’s at, not only for talent to support their films but to support each other. But Telluride is never short on stars and they came out in droves this year, some for the very first time. Colin Farrell, here for the Edward Berger Netflix film Ballad of a Small Player, joked in his introduction of the film, “What a shit hole,” to laughter from the audience. Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor were in town with two films each; Hamnet for Mescal, The Mastermind for O’Connor and The History of Sound, which starred them both. Margot Robbie didn’t have a film at the fest but was found at multiple screenings and bookstores over the weekend. She does have the upcoming Kogonada film A Big Beautiful Journey with Colin Farrell later this month. Ryan Coogler dropped in to see films and was stunned by Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. “The other films were beautiful but you hid behind things,” he told her. “This is the first time I saw you in there. You’re finally being seen.”
Let’s take a quick Hamnet side trek while we’re here. At each of the screenings where Zhao introduced the film, she did so in the most unorthodox way. Bringing the entire audience into a meditative ritual (see below) that was integral to a crucial scene with 300 extras in the film’s finale, the audience breathed and sighed with closed eyes and open hearts. “This is my heart. This is my heart. This is my heart,” she repeated. Once we saw the film and fully absorbed its context (as you will when you see it), it created something unique and universal. The world around us is in the midst of generational chaos. Quite literally, as we all turned off our phones, we expected to turn them back on with news that the President of the United States had died (sadly, he didn’t). But in this moment we were one.
La Marmotte is always a hotspot as Focus Features hosts their annual brunch there. For Hamnet, Jessie Buckley and Mescal mingled with friends and journos and Mescal’s All of Us Strangers (2023) co-star Andrew Scott stopped by to give some love. The Bugonia team of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons rarely left the top section of the party, with Plemons bringing people in for sidewalk conversations. At the A24 soiree, in support of Harry Lighton’s bawdy sub-dom romance Pillion with Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling (two of the nicest guys ever), Skarsgård told me he hadn’t seen his father’s film yet but would the next day. The party brought in Emma Stone, who immediately began searching for a vape pen to replace her Juul. NEON, with one of the healthiest lineups of the season, held its annual event at 221 Oak St. once again, featuring Cannes Grand Jury winner Sentimental Value with director Joachim Trier and stars Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as well as dissident director Jafar Panahi (It Was Just an Accident), hot off his Palme d’Or win for the film, as well two more Cannes winners, Kleber Mendonça Filho (Best Director) and Wagner Moura (Best Actor) for The Secret Agent. Netflix didn’t host just one party, or even just two. The streamer giant held four full events in support of their three films at the fest: Jay Kelly, Ballad of a Small Player and Nouvelle Vague, as well as a single party to celebrate them all, including the surprise screening of Frankenstein, another one of Huntsinger’s steals (the film, which had just had its world premiere in Venice the night before, was supposed to next play Toronto). Colin Farrell, Laura Dern, Adam Sandler, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Zoey Deutch and Guillaume Marbeck all spent time fielding compliments and questions from attendees as Oscar Isaac swooped in for a less than 24 hour visit. As quickly as he arrived from Venice he was on his way back to be present for his other film in that festival, Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante.
But perhaps the biggest star to grace the Rocky Mountains this weekend was no less than the single-monikered legend herself, Oprah. Dressed in all denim (and really, the Canadian tuxedo was the outfit of the festival, full stop). “I got these boots at the best little store in Chicago. Oh, and by the way, I’m Oprah.” she told one of AwardsWatch’s contributors, Jorge. She was at the front of the line for Sentimental Value and readers, she cried. And cried. And cried. But she was also personable, open and taking selfies and talking about her love of the film to anyone that would listen.
But, along with Venice, one of the key components of the Telluride Film Festival is how it fits in the Oscar race, and often, how it steers it. Back in 2008, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire premiered at Telluride in a year without much of an early frontrunner. Originally set up Warner Independent Pictures (RIP) with an international and domestic release date, the now defunct offshoot of WB began scrambling for a buyer in August, thinking the film was going to be a box office failure and even considering a direct to video route. Fox Searchlight Pictures (now Searchlight Pictures), itself the indie brand of a major studio, jumped on board, buying a 50% stake and releasing the film stateside. The rest is history there, the film was a massive box office success and an even bigger one at the Oscars, winning eight including Best Picture and Best Director. This set off a trend that became nearly a requirement; if you wanted to win Best Picture, you needed to screen at Telluride. Not even as a world premiere, it just had to be there. That held true all the way until 2018’s Green Book, which opted for a Toronto bow. But even in the years since, despite the expansion of earlier or later festival appearances bypassing the mountain fest and earning Oscar gold (like CODA from Sundance and Everything Everywhere All At Once from SXSW) or even the rare non-festival film (Oppenheimer), Telluride remains a ground zero for the awards conversation. The private enclave is flooded with journalists and movie lovers over the Labor Day weekend but the meat and potatoes of the folks that buy passes look like a cross section of the Academy itself: older, seasoned voters. They love discovery, to be tastemakers even (as do the journos, for sure).
So what did people like this year? As mentioned, Cannes film made a huge splash. Sentimental Value was a name that popped up several times during my conversations with audiences, The Secret Agent, too. Tuner, a lighthearted dramedy caper really touched hearts and spoke to people. Cover-Up, which ported over late from Venice was also in the ether during chats at the picnic that closes the festival. But one film dominated these conversations in a way that I, and my team, found unexpected. In a time where the U.S. and the world are in a state of terrifying uncertainty and barbaric authoritarianism, I expected something light or escapist to be the film of choice. Certainly not something dark or depressing or in that vein. But I was wrong. In the seven years I’ve been coming to Telluride I’ve never heard and felt such a unifying choice when I ask people in line or next to me in a theater what the best thing they’ve seen, or they’re favorite film (often two different things). It was Hamnet. Over and over again. The semi-fictional story of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway (Agnes here) going through the worst thing a parent can experience, the death of a young child, captivated people. It brought out empathy and a watershed of tears, tears that felt built up not exclusively to the film (although, whew) but in a unifying feeling of release. A huge social sigh. If you’re here hopefully you’ve watched the video above with Hamnet director Chloé Zhao as her stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal stood by, hands on their hearts.
But what does that translate to in Oscar terms? Focus Features, who is distributing Hamnet, has been highly successful at getting Best Picture nominations for their films but the win has eluded them. Famously, the 23-year old distributor had their best shot exactly 20 years ago and it seemed like a clear path for the flourishing studio who was hot off major Oscar wins for The Pianist (2002) and Lost in Translation (2003). Everything was going for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain at the time until it wasn’t and the win was thwarted by the big Crash. Since then, the studio (the indie brand of Universal) has earned several top Oscars, including Best Actor (Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, Gary Oldman for Darkest Hour, Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club), all from Best Picture nominees. Recently they’ve had The Holdovers (Best Supporting Actress winner), Tár and Conclave (Adapted Screenplay winner) all right at the gate. So, while it’s still early in the Oscar race and in this first week of September feeling without a real frontrunner (depending on how you see Sinners working its way through the fall and winter films), Chloé Zhao, who won Best Director and Best Picture for 2020’s Nomadland, could join Jane Campion as only the second woman to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar twice and potentially the first to win twice. Hamnet is set for an expansive fall festival release and has already started garnering awards and tributes (Buckley is set for a Mill Valley Film Festival honor next month when the film opens the Marin County fest) so the path is being set. While the outcome remains unknown, voters choose what moves them, what they’re passionate about, what’s inside. “This is my heart. This is my heart. This is my heart.” could be the mantra of the season, a heart of gold.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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