The 2023 Sundance Film Festival once again returned to Park City, Utah in-person, but it also had an online program that hosted the majority of its film slate. However, some titles, such as Celine Song’s Past Lives and John Carney’s Flora and Son, only played for in-person attendants. Showbiz Cheat Sheet only covered Sundance remotely for 2023, but here are the 10 films we saw that stood above the rest.
L-r: ‘Passages,’ ‘Rye Lane,’ ‘Shayda,’ and ‘A Thousand and One’ | Mubi, Searchlight Pictures, Courtesy of Sundance Institute, Courtesy of Sundance Institute 10. ‘Fairyland’ L-r: Cody Fern as Eddie Body, Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, and Nessa Dougherty as Younger Alysia Abbott | Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Fairyland marks the directorial feature debut for Andrew Durham, which follows a young girl who moves to 1970s San Francisco with her gay dad after her mom’s death. It’s based on a marvelous novel of the same name.
L-r: ‘Passages,’ ‘Rye Lane,’ ‘Shayda,’ and ‘A Thousand and One’ | Mubi, Searchlight Pictures, Courtesy of Sundance Institute, Courtesy of Sundance Institute 10. ‘Fairyland’ L-r: Cody Fern as Eddie Body, Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, and Nessa Dougherty as Younger Alysia Abbott | Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Fairyland marks the directorial feature debut for Andrew Durham, which follows a young girl who moves to 1970s San Francisco with her gay dad after her mom’s death. It’s based on a marvelous novel of the same name.
- 1/31/2023
- by Jeff Nelson
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
2023 Sundance Film Festival: Early highlights include ‘Fairyland,’ ‘Magazine Dreams,’ ‘Past Lives’ …
The first week of the Sundance Film Festival is drawing mixed-to-positive reactions, but several performers have garnered unanimous praise. Jonathan Majors made a big splash in Elijah Bynum’s “Magazine Dreams.” He stars as Killian Maddox, an obsessive bodybuilder who takes care of his Vietnam vet grandfather (Harrison Page) and pursues a relationship with a store clerk (Hayley Bennett) while trying to become a celebrity. The film, which is being compared to Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” looked noteworthy heading into the festival and is reportedly just as intense as early buzz had promised. Even critics who have expressed skepticism regarding the film’s third act are in awe of Majors’ committed work.
Kate Erbland of IndieWire writes, “As mistakes and missteps and pain continues to pile on to Killian, Majors turns an already wonderfully empathetic and deeply touching performance into something much more brutal, something explosive, something truly shocking.
Kate Erbland of IndieWire writes, “As mistakes and missteps and pain continues to pile on to Killian, Majors turns an already wonderfully empathetic and deeply touching performance into something much more brutal, something explosive, something truly shocking.
- 1/29/2023
- by Ronald Meyer
- Gold Derby
Plot: After his wife dies tragically, Steve (Scoot McNairy) uproots his young daughter, Alysia, and moves to San Francisco, where he begins to explore his repressed homosexuality amid the growing gay rights movement of the 70s. Years later, in the 80s, as the AIDS crisis decimates the community, a now-grown Alysia (Emilia Jones) returns home to care for his dying father.
Review: Fairyland was one of the most ambitious movies to play this year’s Sundance Film Festival. While it’s a well-acted adaptation of the memoir by Alysia Abbott, it was the movie that made me notice how much the indie scene has changed. A decade or so ago, a star-driven historical drama based on a best-selling book would have gotten a healthy budget and perhaps backing from a mini-major such as Searchlight or Focus. In the new, micro-budget era, first-time director Andrew Durham has had to craft a...
Review: Fairyland was one of the most ambitious movies to play this year’s Sundance Film Festival. While it’s a well-acted adaptation of the memoir by Alysia Abbott, it was the movie that made me notice how much the indie scene has changed. A decade or so ago, a star-driven historical drama based on a best-selling book would have gotten a healthy budget and perhaps backing from a mini-major such as Searchlight or Focus. In the new, micro-budget era, first-time director Andrew Durham has had to craft a...
- 1/28/2023
- by Chris Bumbray
- JoBlo.com
Told from the perspective of a young girl raised by her single gay father to be a woman who is “strong and tolerant and not afraid of this world,” Fairyland reveals the intensely personal nature of its origins in Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir at every step of the characters’ complicated evolution together. Like that sometimes strained relationship, this debut feature from photographer Andrew Durham often feels stuck, but eventually reaches its destination with clear-eyed compassion and an emotionally powerful reconciliation. Those qualities are captured with enormous sensitivity in the lead performances of Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy.
With a producing team led by Sofia Coppola for American Zoetrope, this is a bittersweet drama about unconventional parenting and alternative families that will resonate loudest with LGBTQ audiences. But its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.
The film...
With a producing team led by Sofia Coppola for American Zoetrope, this is a bittersweet drama about unconventional parenting and alternative families that will resonate loudest with LGBTQ audiences. But its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.
The film...
- 1/27/2023
- by David Rooney
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Andrew Durham makes his directorial feature debut at the Sundance Film Festival with an adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s remarkably intimate memoir, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, shortening the title to just Fairyland. The story spans from her childhood to adulthood, capturing a longitudinal look into her relationship with her father in a city that became home. Fairyland is emotionally moving, but Durham’s screenplay trips a bit on bringing the source material to the silver screen.
‘Fairyland’ follows a father and daughter chasing a new life in San Francisco L-r: Cody Fern as Eddie Body, Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, and Nessa Dougherty as Younger Alysia Abbott | Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Alysia suddenly loses her mother in a tragic car accident. Her father, Steve (Scoot McNairy), sees an opportunity for a new start with his daughter, moving to San Francisco in the 1970s. There, he develops his skills...
‘Fairyland’ follows a father and daughter chasing a new life in San Francisco L-r: Cody Fern as Eddie Body, Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, and Nessa Dougherty as Younger Alysia Abbott | Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Alysia suddenly loses her mother in a tragic car accident. Her father, Steve (Scoot McNairy), sees an opportunity for a new start with his daughter, moving to San Francisco in the 1970s. There, he develops his skills...
- 1/26/2023
- by Jeff Nelson
- Showbiz Cheat Sheet
Andrew Durham’s Fairyland features Scoot McNairy as Steve Abbott, a single father who takes his daughter Alysia to San Francisco in the early 1970s after the death of his wife in a car accident. Adapted from a memoir of the same name by the real-life Alysia Abbott, Durham’s debut feature explores nearly two decades of this father-daughter relationship. About halfway through the film, Alysia jumps in age, going from a precocious, carefree child (Nessa Dougherty) to an edgy, isolated teenager (Emilia Jones). Steve, possibly as open as a father can be, is bisexual, and his fate becomes intertwined with the AIDS crisis; the film’s ending never seems to be in doubt.
Durham consistently places the camera from new perspectives. A photographer by trade, she decides to shoot early scenes from the view of a young Alysia, looking up at the wide-eyed world around her: a queer community...
Durham consistently places the camera from new perspectives. A photographer by trade, she decides to shoot early scenes from the view of a young Alysia, looking up at the wide-eyed world around her: a queer community...
- 1/24/2023
- by Michael Frank
- The Film Stage
Stories about the gay heyday of 1970s San Francisco — and the cruel chaser of the AIDS crisis the following decade — often hang on the notion of chosen family within the queer community: the bonds formed when blood ties are severed by prejudice. Studies of biological family, and parenthood especially, in that context are more unusual, which is what makes Alysia Abbott’s book “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father” so moving. An account of her upbringing by a gay single father amid the LGBTQ liberation movement, and her subsequent nursing of him through AIDS, it balances an eager child’s-eye acceptance of counterculture living with an older woman’s melancholy over things unsaid or misspoken. In “Fairyland,” Andrew Durham adapts her story with warmth and sensitivity, though those perspectives are more fluently bridged on the page than on the screen.
A photographer making his feature-length debut as writer-director, Durham initially...
A photographer making his feature-length debut as writer-director, Durham initially...
- 1/21/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Scoot McNairy is going to break your heart in Andrew Durham’s debut feature “Fairyland,” produced by Sofia Coppola and adapted from Alysia Abbott’s “Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father.” McNairy stars as Steve Abbott, a writer and widower who packs up his battered red Volkswagen bug and moves his young daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) to San Francisco in the 1970s after the tragic death of his wife in a car accident.
In San Francisco, Steve can pursue his writing career and a queer lifestyle, all while providing Alysia with a free-wheeling, bohemian and highly independent childhood, one that is creative, honest and lived without shame, in a setting that’s more glam-rock than Summer of Love. However, like most kids and young adults, it will take years for Alysia to come to terms with the unique benefits of growing up in such an unconventional manner.
Durham takes care...
In San Francisco, Steve can pursue his writing career and a queer lifestyle, all while providing Alysia with a free-wheeling, bohemian and highly independent childhood, one that is creative, honest and lived without shame, in a setting that’s more glam-rock than Summer of Love. However, like most kids and young adults, it will take years for Alysia to come to terms with the unique benefits of growing up in such an unconventional manner.
Durham takes care...
- 1/21/2023
- by Katie Walsh
- The Wrap
Emilia Jones earned a lot of attention as the star of 2021’s big Sundance winner and eventual Best Picture Oscar winner Coda, and the praise should be continuing this year as she not only stars in Cat People but also Fairyland, which had its world premiere in Park City on Friday.
Sofia Coppola serves as lead producer for this American Zoetrope production of Andrew Durham’s feature film writing and directing debut, and it is a memorable one that is unlikely to leave a dry eye in the house. It had me in quiet tears by the end of this film adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s moving 2013 memoir of growing up in San Francisco with her widowed father just as gay pride was taking hold and the AIDS epidemic was on the horizon. This is not a sweeping panorama of what happened there in the 1970s and ’80s, but rather...
Sofia Coppola serves as lead producer for this American Zoetrope production of Andrew Durham’s feature film writing and directing debut, and it is a memorable one that is unlikely to leave a dry eye in the house. It had me in quiet tears by the end of this film adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s moving 2013 memoir of growing up in San Francisco with her widowed father just as gay pride was taking hold and the AIDS epidemic was on the horizon. This is not a sweeping panorama of what happened there in the 1970s and ’80s, but rather...
- 1/21/2023
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
Exclusive: Maria Bakalova (Bodies Bodies Bodies) has joined the casts of Andrew Durham’s feature directorial debut Fairyland for American Zoetrope, and Jerry Seinfeld’s first film Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story for Netflix. Details as to the roles she’ll be playing in the features have not been disclosed, though we hear she’ll only be making a cameo in the latter.
Fairyland is a father-daughter coming-of-age story that Durham adapted from Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. The book originally published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2012 is set against San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene of the 1970s and ’80s, both before and after the AIDS epidemic — a crisis that would ultimately claim the life of Abbott’s father, the widowed poet and gay activist, Steve Abbott. Bakalova joins an ensemble led by Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy, which also includes Geena Davis, Cody Fern,...
Fairyland is a father-daughter coming-of-age story that Durham adapted from Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. The book originally published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2012 is set against San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene of the 1970s and ’80s, both before and after the AIDS epidemic — a crisis that would ultimately claim the life of Abbott’s father, the widowed poet and gay activist, Steve Abbott. Bakalova joins an ensemble led by Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy, which also includes Geena Davis, Cody Fern,...
- 8/11/2022
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
Click here to read the full article.
Coda star Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy have nabbed lead roles in producer Sofia Coppola’s Fairyland adaptation for American Zoetrope, with director Andrew Durham having just wrapped production on his debut feature.
Coppola and American Zoetrope acquired the screen rights to Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, a coming-of-age account of Abbott growing up with her single father — widowed poet and gay activist Steve Abbott — amid the AIDS epidemic in 1970s and 1980s San Francisco.
Geena Davis, Adam Lambert, Cody Fern, Bella Murphy and newcomer Nessa Dougherty round out the cast for the movie adaptation. Veteran fashion and commercial photographer Durham penned the feature, which he directed and produced along with Coppola, Megan Carlson, Siena Oberman, Greg Lauritano and Laure Sudreau.
Nicole Shipley, Michael Musante, Laure Sudreau, Alysia Abbott, Jeff Sobrato, Jesse Ozeri, Sasha Shapiro, Anton Lessine, Gale Harold,...
Coda star Emilia Jones and Scoot McNairy have nabbed lead roles in producer Sofia Coppola’s Fairyland adaptation for American Zoetrope, with director Andrew Durham having just wrapped production on his debut feature.
Coppola and American Zoetrope acquired the screen rights to Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, a coming-of-age account of Abbott growing up with her single father — widowed poet and gay activist Steve Abbott — amid the AIDS epidemic in 1970s and 1980s San Francisco.
Geena Davis, Adam Lambert, Cody Fern, Bella Murphy and newcomer Nessa Dougherty round out the cast for the movie adaptation. Veteran fashion and commercial photographer Durham penned the feature, which he directed and produced along with Coppola, Megan Carlson, Siena Oberman, Greg Lauritano and Laure Sudreau.
Nicole Shipley, Michael Musante, Laure Sudreau, Alysia Abbott, Jeff Sobrato, Jesse Ozeri, Sasha Shapiro, Anton Lessine, Gale Harold,...
- 6/6/2022
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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