I Love Boosters Is the Pick of the Week

Boots Riley is a rapper, songwriter, and filmmaker. His first film, Sorry to Bother You, was a wild satire about an African American telemarketer who adopts a white person’s voice in order to make more sales. But that doesn’t begin to explain how crazy weird the film is.

I Love Boosters is about a group of shoplifters who routinely steal high-end clothes from a particular designer (a wonderful Demi Moore) and then resell them at a discount. But like Sorry to Bother You, things get weird real quick. There is a demon (Lakeith Stanfield) who can suck out your soul while performing oral sex, a magical bag that can clear out a store in seconds, and so much more.

Riley seems like a guy so excited about getting to make a film that he just throws everything he can think of at it, maybe thinking he’ll never get another chance. Not everything works, but for the most part this is a deliriously fun film. I hope he gets to make many more films, and I’m happy to make this one my pick.

Also coming out this week that looks interesting.

Toy Story 5: It feels weird not making this my Pick of the Week. It feels really weird that I didn’t watch this film in the theaters. The original three films are beloved. They are some of my favorite animated films ever. But the third film said everything these films needed to say. It had a perfect ending. The fourth film was a lot of fun, but it felt perfunctory in a way that makes me not all that interested in this fifth installment.

Nouvelle Vague: Richard Linklater’s love letter to the French New Wave gets the Criterion treatment.

Italo-Crime Collection: A mostly terrific collection of three Italian thrillers from the 1970s. You can read my full review of the Kino Lorber set.

The Secret Agent: Criterion presents this thriller about a man trying to escape his past in 1970s Brazil.

Faces of Death: If you were of a certain age and of a certain disposition in the 1980s, you likely saw one of the notorious Faces of Death films. They were pseudo-documentary films that purportedly showed real-life, on-screen deaths. Quite a few of them were faked, but some were real. These days you can watch a million horrible deaths on the internet, but back then it was new, and weird, and terrifying. For this new horror film, someone is committing new murders based on those films. That’s a fun concept, but the execution is sadly lacking.

Interview with the Vampire: Neil Jordan’s controversial adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel gets the UHD treatment from Warner Bros.

Evil Dead Rise: I’ll never understand why these new Evil Dead films are so devoid of fun. Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness are classics because they perfectly blended their horror with comedy. This film involves a grieving woman seeking solace with her in-laws and getting attacked by Deadites.