Telluride Lineups Includes ‘Nickel Boys,' ‘Conclave,' ‘Saturday Night' and ‘The Piano Lesson'

The Telluride Film Festival, which runs over the four-day Labor Day weekend (this year, August 30 – September 2), has announced the lineup for its 51st edition.

Telluride is a fest that thrives on “Oscar buzz,” with hundreds of pundits and publicists descending to the Colorado mountains each year to kickstart the race for golden statuettes. This year seems to be no exception with “Nickel Boys,” “Conclave,” “Maria,” “The Piano Lesson,” and “Saturday Night” set to screen.

Festival director Julie Huntsinger tells IndieWire’s Anne Thompson to watch out for “Nickel Boys,” which might very well be the most talked about film of the fest:

It’s such a towering achievement. I couldn’t believe it. My jaw dropped to the floor. You almost can’t speak after because it’s cinematically engaging, arresting. It is emotionally rewarding. It should be one of the most talked about films of the whole year.

Huntsinger also mentions Gabriel LaBelle’s performance in “Saturday Night” as the young Lorne Michaels, along with the supporting cast.

Pablo Larrain’s recent Netflix pick-up “Maria,” and Angelina Jolie’s performance, is also singled out. “She plays Maria in this really cool way,” said Huntsinger, “with a wry, knowing, tiny little underscore of humor to her, even though there’s a heaviness. The screenplay of ‘Maria’ [by Steven Knight] is some of the best writing I have witnessed in a long time.”

Another title that seems to have good buzz is the Robbie Williams biopic musical “Better Man” from director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) “From the first frame, it grabs you in the most exuberant, lovely, excited dance hug,” said Huntsinger. “It’ll be a big surprise for a lot of people.

“[As for] “The End,” you could talk about these movies in the same way. There’s a lot of joy in this program. And in “The End,” Joshua [Oppenheimer] is presenting some stuff that is sad and heavy about what we’ve done to the planet. How can we repair ourselves and it?”

Here’s the main program for the 51st Telluride Film Festival:

“All We Imagine as Light” (Payal Kapadia)
“Anora” (Sean Baker)
“Apocalypse in the Tropics” (Petra Costa)
“Better Man” (Michael Gracey)
“Bird” (Andrea Arnold)
“Blink” (Daniel Roher)
“Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!” (Matt Tyrnauer)
“Conclave” (Edward Berger)
“Disclaimer” (Alfonso Cuarón)
“Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” (Embeth Davidtz)
“Emilia Pérez” (Jacques Audiard)
“In Waves and War” (Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk)
“Jean Cocteau” (Lisa Immordino Vreeland)
“Leonardo Da Vinci” (Ken Burns)
“Maria” (Pablo Larraín)
“Martha” (R.J. Cutler)
“Memoir of a Snail” (Adam Elliot)
“Misericordia” (Alain Guiraudie)
“Nickel Boys” (RaMell Ross)
“No Other Land” (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal)
“One to One: John & Yoko” (Kevin Macdonald)
“Piece by Piece” (Morgan Neville)
“Santosh” (Sandhya Suri)
“Saturday Night” (Jason Reitman)
“Separated” (Errol Morris)
“September 5” (Tim Fehlbaum)
“Social Studies” (Lauren Greenfield)
“The End” (Joshua Oppenheimer)
“The Friend” (David Siegel, Scott McGehee)
“The Outrun” (Nora Fingscheidt)
“The Piano Lesson” (Malcolm Washington)
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Mohammad Rasoulof)
“The White House Effect” (Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, Pedro Kos)
“Will & Harper” (Josh Greenbaum)
“Zurawski v Texas” (Maisie Crow, Abbie Perrault)