I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026) ★
Boots Riley is both an impossibly imaginative artist and a traditional red-diaper Marxist, and his work as both a filmmaker and as a musician can be interpreted as an ongoing attempt to harmonize those two fundamental facts. So this is why I Love Boosters is a breakneck-pace caper packed with nifty SF/F conceits and eye-popping production design, but also a film that pauses to make sure you understand what "the dialectic" is. As you might predict, the film doesn’t perfectly synthesize these impulses: it wants to be both stuffed with unexpected narrative turns while also remaining committed to the Marxist dogma that a worker's revolution is the end point that all class conflict inevitably heads toward—a balancing act that I'm not confident could be pulled off by any filmmaker, alive or dead. Points for attempting it, even if the end result comes off feeling lumpy or ungainly at times, with an ending that feels a bit overdetermined. With that said, I can forgive a lot here, especially since I’m disinclined to fault a film for either being "too imaginative" or "too progressive.” So—onward, comrades. We have nothing to lose but our chains?
