Dear Wags,

Telluride, the insider’s film festival, kicked off this weekend. Should you survive a precarious landing at an airport jammed into the San Juan Mountains, you’ll be able to catch a few Oscar movies. Everything about Telluride is exclusive. Passes and hotels are exorbitant, the location is remote, and the event doesn’t announce its lineup until the very last minute. Once you’re marooned in the Rockies, you get a tightly curated list of the year’s best pictures.

Coming to the high country with plenty of buzz is Nickel Boys, starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ethan Herisse, and Daveed Diggs. The historical drama about a notorious reform school is directed by RaMell Ross and adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel. The Piano Lesson, based on August Wilson’s 1987 play, stars John David Washington alongside Samuel L. Jackson, and Danielle Deadwyler as relatives clashing over a family heirloom. Sigrid Noonan’s bestseller, The Friend comes to the screen with Naomi Watts as a woman who develops a touching friendship with a Great Dane (played by an adorable pup named Bing). Nora Fingscheidt directs festival honoree Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun, the tale of a troubled urbanite who finds serenity in the Orkney Islands.

Fresh off a warm reception in Venice, Angelina Jolie’s diva biopic, Maria, directed by Pablo Larraín will play for the home crowd. September 5, with Peter Sarsgaard as part of an ABC Sports crew covering the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, also makes the trek from Italy. Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in the Polish road comedy A Real Pain opposite Kieran Culkin. Conclave, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller, stars Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal who stumbles on dark secrets in the Vatican. Another nail-biter — can it possibly be good?— is Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, a look back at the 1975 debut of SNL, with Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels.

Telluride has an impressive roster of documentaries, among them Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper, a Sundance darling, which salutes the friendship of Will Ferrell and writer Harper Steele, who came out as trans at 60. Wag Matt Trynauer, always in fancy loafers and a tailored blazer, has two Telluride docs: Nobu, a profile of celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa, and Carville: Winning Is Everything Stupid! about the Mouth of the South, James Carville.

A host of Cannes favorites are also screening in Colorado. There’s Mohammed Rasoulof’s indictment of Iranian corruption, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an Oscar contender for Best International Feature Film; Anora, Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning Cinderella story, and the quirky musical Emilia Pérez, starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz (like Ronan, director Jacques Audiard is getting Telluride’s Silver Medallion award). Toronto lumbers onto the festival calendar next, but we now have a pretty firm sense of what pictures will be in the awards hunt. Will any of them capture public fascination? The disruptions of the past are fading, but Hollywood’s existential crisis persists.

Yours Ever,

Sarah Brown

Back in the Building

Only Murders in the Buildings (Hulu). As of this week, Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez are back on the Upper West Side, sleuthing. This time out, they’re on trying to figure out who killed Zazz (Jane Lynch), Steve’s stunt double. Meanwhile, the trio’s podcast is being turned into a movie by a dotty mogul (Molly Shannon) that will star Eugene Levy, Zach Zach Galifianakis, and Eva Longoria. Still a lovable exercise, but getting a bit much with the guest stars (Meryl Streep is back; Richard Kind and Melissa McCarthy also show up). This building becoming less of a morgue than an employment agency. — Elizabeth Folger

A Few More Rings to Rule Them All

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime). Nothing is more annoying than debates about Tolkien. We’ve written about this at trilogy length. Amazon’s reinvention of Middle Earth I.P. got a decidedly mixed reception when it debuted — some fanboys thought Middle Earth had hired a DEI specialist. In any case, it’s back for a more assured Season 2, with Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) wrestling with that old bugaboo of ring temptation. — Bella D. Took