Month: January 2023

If you have kids (or like to collect cute toys), you’ve probably encountered LOL Surprise! Dolls. These giant-headed, millennial-inspired dolls come wrapped in opaque packaging, so the opener doesn’t know which doll they will get until the toy is unwrapped. There are also various layers of packaging containing extra surprise gifts like hair ties or glitter spray, which makes the whole unwrapping process an ‘experience’ (this concept was actually inspired by the popularity of YouTube unboxing videos). These dolls have become one of the most popular toys on the market – there’s even a New York Times article about how they became a ‘cultural phenomenon’.

LOL Surprise! Winter Fashion Show is the latest installment in the LOL Dolls film series and is currently streaming on Netflix.

In the new LOL Dolls film, emerging fashion star Neonlicious’ debut fashion collection goes “missing”, so she needs to use all her creativity to

Director Tam Sainsbury has crafted award-winning short films such as Pinky Promise, web series Time & Place, and now she directs her third feature, 13 Summers.

Sainsbury’s first was Ryder Country, a psychological thriller set amongst a group of scientists in the Australian outback; her next feature was Perfect Messy Love, a romantic comedy based on her web series of the same name. Sainsbury is heading back into darker territory with 13 Summers, a coastal-set thriller, written by Jeremy Stanford, that sees an estranged couple (Nathan Phillips, Hannah Levien) locked in a battle of wills with a mysterious and unwanted houseguest (Ben Turland).

FilmInk sat down with Tam Sainsbury to discuss the project.

This is your second psychological thriller (after Ryder Country), what attracts you to this genre?

“It’s my favourite genre to watch – there is nothing more fascinating than the human mind.

This article appeared in the November 11, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

A Couple (Frederick Wiseman, 2022)

“If the world could write itself,” Isaac Babel once remarked, “it would write like Tolstoy.” Something similar could be said about Frederick Wiseman, the legendary nonfiction filmmaker who has studied almost every institution that has meaningfully shaped American civic and social life over the past 60 years, including penitentiaries, schools, municipal governments, community organizations, and cultural foundations. Like Tolstoy, Wiseman often works on a vast scale, sometimes with hundreds of people appearing in a single film. Less frequently acknowledged, but just as remarkable, is his ability to capture the attitudes and predicaments of individuals as not just the effects but also the instruments of the systems in which they find themselves.

Wiseman’s new 

This article appeared in the November 23, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2022)

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest feature, Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, opens with a POV shot. The camera embarks on a running head start, leaps into the air, and floats for a few moments before returning to terra firma. If the sequence captures the emotional state of Iñárritu’s thinly veiled alter ego, Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho)—a man so disconnected from his professional life that he’s barely present even when his feet are planted squarely on the ground—it also, almost knowingly, offers Iñárritu’s critics a cheeky metaphor to lob against the film. Bardo is the kind of smugly self-aware work that believes it’s