Variety's Telluride Film Festival dispatch rounds up the strongest early Oscar contenders to emerge from the mountain gathering, with Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" still seen as the film to beat despite a competitive field. Jesse Eisenberg's third directorial feature, "The Debut," emerged as the festival's hottest ticket, positioning Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti as major awards contenders, while Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary posed a provocative test for the notoriously conservative documentary branch's voting habits.

Moore stars as a suburban homemaker turned amateur actress in "The Debut," in a comic, warm performance that drew mid-film applause from the Telluride crowd, with Giamatti as her demanding director; Eisenberg wrote seven original songs for the film, one of which is tipped for a best original song push. Fielder's "You Can See Everything," co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, follows Elizabeth Holmes across the 34 days before her prison sentence began and beyond, blending documentary footage with dramatised reconstructions featuring an Oscar-eligible actor, though its unconventional, filmmaker-implicated style may struggle with traditionalist documentary voters. Jordan Firstman's directorial debut "Club Kid," about a party promoter confronted by the son he never knew, also outperformed expectations with older industry audiences.