Kenny’s 2026 Telluride Film Festival Recap

The 2026 Telluride Film Festival had the best lineup since the 2010’s and I had positive things to say about everything I watched. Here are the highlights from some of my favorite movies.

The hit of the festival not involving Nathan Fielder, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid was one of the breakouts of the Telluride Film Festival, and for good reason. The Sean Baker vibes of this authentic slice of New York City life captivated the audience, who were delighted by the “gay Big Daddy” premise: an underground LGBTQ+ club scene promoter forced to take care of the 10-year-old son he didn’t know he had. His whole world is turned upside down as the unexpected responsibility gives him a new sense of purpose and forces him to reconsider what family really means. A hilarious, heartfelt New York coming-of-age story about finding family when you least expect it, Club Kid is ultimately about how an unexpected biological family can become part of a chosen one, and how that chosen family can embrace someone they never expected to be part of it. The best performances come from Firstman, kid actor Reggie Absalom, and Diego Calva as a social worker.

Blending the darkly comic sensibilities of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is an offbeat ride with a distinctly eccentric voice. This is familiar territory for McDonagh. He balances violence, absurdity, and existential humor with a real affection for his characters, all in an unfamiliar and tense setting. John Malkovich’s oddball persona carries a melancholy edge that keeps the comedy in check. It works to the film’s advantage, and like the film itself, his performance is unpredictable. His character always seems capable of veering into either tragedy or caricature. Those who are used to seeing Malkovich as an unhinged character actor will be caught off guard by his restraint. McDonagh has a sharp ear for dialogue. Bursts of violence give the film a literary Tarantino quality, while its quirky rhythms and lively exchanges inject energy, and an underlying sadness keeps it grounded. Beneath the outrageous situations and dark humor, Wild Horse Nine finds a genuine sense of loneliness. It makes for a peculiar but entertaining mix of crime, comedy, and melancholy. The tribute conversation was a very nice reflection of his career.

Adapting the literary biography The Gambler Wife by Andrew D. Kaufman, directors Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s) bring an imperfect, imbalanced tone that works in key comedic moments, leaving the audience howling with delight. It features random outbursts of modernity between pop songs that don’t fit the setting or time period, creating a quirky disposition that is tonally all over the place, even if it doesn’t always work. An exchange between them (“We need food.” “We need money for gambling”) sums up their predicament and why they are struggling financially, while he writes what becomes his greatest work. A wildly offbeat, laugh-out-loud portrait of love, gambling, and artistic genius that refuses to play by the rules. Though imperfect, it features some of the biggest laughs I had during the film festival, so I wanted to include it.

Andrew Scott is exceptional as Ian Charleson, slowly dying before our eyes in the powerful character-study drama “Elsinore. His final performances as Hamlet at the National Theatre, while seriously ill with AIDS, capture the tragedy of a man confronting mortality in public while battling it in private. As an English major nerd, there’s something devastatingly Shakespearean about watching Charlson perform Hamlet’s meditation on death while his own body becomes what the character contemplates. The stage becomes both his refuge and his grave. The acting scenes are harrowing, while the process of seeking medical care quietly mirrors the stages of grief. Scott captures the tension between Charlson’s public commitment to performance and his private suffering. The third act was an absolute knockout. It takes everything established on screen and makes Charlson’s final performance feel like a haunting answer to Hamlet’s question of what it means to endure. And what we see is someone who truly lives.

Like last year, which had three Hamlet-related movies, the Telluride programmers also featured two adjacent movies about the British National Theatre. The other was a documentary that briefly mentions Ian Charleson. Sometimes one of the smaller movies in the program screening at The Backlot can sneak up on audiences, one that has fewer than 20 Letterboxd log-ins and doesn’t have a post. (Normalize seeing movies at film festivals without posters on Letterboxd.) Into The Breach, directed by Freddie Fox, explores the history and cultural impact of modern British theater. Feel-good, informative, and poised for niche commercial appeal, the movie’s strength is the round table featuring stars sharing stories, including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, and Helen Mirren—the cinematic equivalent of eating brunch and catching up over tea.

Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love is anchored by a terrific Rami Malek, who commands the screen with an intensity that makes his character’s inner life feel vulnerable and believable. Malek and Sachs make an effective pairing, with the actor’s more restrained but hypnotic performance fitting Sachs’ observational style. The film offers a convincing glimpse into its period, capturing the social atmosphere and emotional constraints of the time without turning the past into mere decoration. Rebecca Hall brings subtle refinement to her role, a compelling counterweight to Malek. Scenes unfold at a deliberate pace that sets the mood, but the natural rhythm never feels idle. Instead, the scenes create room for the performances and for relationships to fully form. Even when the drama is understated, a steady tension runs beneath the surface. This carefully acted period piece proves more engaging than its measured pace might initially suggest, despite the lack of a distribution deal. Its film festival programming says otherwise.

Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care is a devastating, understated portrait of a family dealing with pain and loss. It felt almost too real for me, especially since I’ve been processing my grandma’s death earlier this summer. Something about the way Mike Leigh captures grief without pushing it and letting the characters sit with it like they are visiting with loved ones really got to me. He has such a great ear for working-class characters, and he writes women with the same kind of detail and complexity. The cast is phenomenal and works together as one of the best ensembles I’ve seen this year. Everyone feels like they actually know each other, including all the little tensions, frustrations, and moments of affection. The film never feels like it’s trying to tell you how to feel. It just lets this family exist in their pain. Sometimes that makes it even harder to watch.

Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut really caught me off guard. Julianne Moore is very funny as Mona, a woman whose life starts to change once she becomes deeply immersed in her character. Eisenberg draws a lot from the small details and strange moments along the way. Then the film takes a darker turn. The funniest scene comes midway through, when Paul Giamatti pushes Moore’s character through an acting exercise that completely spirals out of control. It was so funny that the Telluride audience actually broke into applause in the middle of the movie. Moore is fearless in the scene, but real pain lies beneath all the comedy. That contrast is what surprised me most. The more Mona loses herself in the role, the more her real life unravels. I wasn’t expecting Eisenberg to take the film in this direction, and Moore makes that transformation both hilarious and genuinely sad.

Bryan Fogel’s “The Row” is a genuinely tense documentary with jaw-dropping sequences. The footage is shocking at times, and the camera work puts you right there in the middle of the Pacific. When his rowing seat breaks mid-journey, and he has to figure out how to keep going, you can feel the panic of being completely at the mercy of the ocean. It felt like the visual equivalent of 4DX: you can almost feel every wave, every bump, every moment of instability, even though your seat isn’t moving. There’s something incredibly visceral about watching Tez Steinberg take on something this extreme while carrying so much personal grief and family trauma with him. The visual effects that capture his hallucinations were an unexpected and raw touch. What an incredible feat captured by a seriously talented director. It’s the kind of documentary that makes you physically tense up, and I loved how immersive it felt.

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra has moments that really stayed with me: the opening 1937 moment, Quifes’s one-take dance, Penélope Cruz’s performance, and fireworks over water. I loved the themes running through the film, especially how it explores the characters’ identity, desire, and their lingering attachment to the past. The visual elements are just as strong, and the movie feels like it’s from the past with a modern twist. There’s real beauty in how the different stories are filmed and connect, and each one has its own feeling. What I liked most was watching the separate stories slowly come together, especially in the second half.  Nothing here ever felt forced. They gave the film a larger emotional shape as it went along. Something is haunting about the way the past keeps resurfacing in different forms. La Bola Negra is visually striking, but it’s the themes and the way these stories come together that really make it feel like a masterpiece.

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland is the kind of film that trusts art house audiences to figure things out without spelling everything out. I really admired the direction and how much it packs into a briskly paced, short runtime of less than 90 minutes. It’s a surprisingly talkative and intellectually dense film, full of ideas about memory, history, politics, and family, but it never feels like it’s trying to lecture you. Sandra Hüller is fantastic. She gives so much through a look or a pause, and her restraint makes the smallest moments hit. The pacing is perfect for the story, both quick and precise, but never rushed. I love films that leave room to sit with them, and Fatherland does exactly that as a quiet, beautifully controlled piece of filmmaking.

Burgundy is such a vibe that washed over me during my viewing experience. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw immerse viewers in unfamiliar worlds that overwhelm the senses in the best ways. You enjoy spending time with these people. There’s something so absorbing about the wine culture, the vineyards, the characters, and all the little rituals around them, like watching people stomp on grapes. I loved their breakout movie The Truffle Hunters during COVID, when I was watching so many online film festivals, and Burgundy gave me that same feeling of being completely transported somewhere else. It’s beautifully shot, quietly funny, and full of these wonderfully specific characters. I could have stayed in this world for another hour. It was nice to see their movie on the big screen, and I hope other audiences do too.