I Love Boosters (2026)
Directed by: Boots Riley
Premise: A group of women steal high priced clothes from a chain of high-end fashion stores and then sell those good on the black market. They join forces with Chinese workers who are striking to improve conditions in the factory.
What Works: I Love Boosters is intended to be a lot of things but it is primarily a countertext to The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and the City, works that celebrated the fashion industry and consumerism. The Velvet Gang is a group of thieves who steal high priced designer clothes and sell those items for their own profit. The booster’s priorities shift as they become aware of the conditions in the factories that make the clothes. I Love Boosters suggests that fashion labels and the black market are all part of the same exploitative system and that people of conscience must extricate themselves from that system and support the labor movement. That much of the film’s politics is clear and plays subversively. I Love Boosters is an impressively and uniquely designed movie. It is intensely stylized. The sets and costumes are color coordinated and the production design has a maximalist style that lampoons the excesses of the fashion industry. The performances are in tune with the visual style, especially Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu as the Velvet Gang and Demi Moore as the CEO of the fashion brand. The movie is very funny and the humor eases the heavy-handedness of the politics.
What Doesn’t: I Love Boosters has a major technical defect in its sound. The film has a goofy score that complements the visual style but the music is badly placed and drowns out the dialogue. I Love Boosters becomes increasingly frustrating to watch. That’s partly attributable to the garbled audio but it’s also due to the film’s overstuffed politics. The art of political storytelling is in embedding ideas into the work organically. Filmmaker Boots Riley is not known for subtlety and I Love Boosters is packed with Marxist ideas but few of those ideas are presented with coherence or relevance. The film has too many ideas getting in the way of the story and it becomes increasingly diverted and clumsy. I Love Boosters introduces a teleportation machine with settings related to dialectical materialism. The filmmakers explain the concept but don’t make it relevant to the rest of the story. The device is ultimately used as a deus ex machina solution in the climax. The cast includes LaKeith Stanfield as the love interest of Keke Palmer’s character but his presence doesn’t make sense narratively or thematically. Stanfield’s character could have been removed from the story without impacting anything.
Bottom Line: I Love Boosters has a lot in it to admire but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The production design is exceptional and the performances are funny but the storytelling is sloppy and the ideas are incomplete.
Episode: #1102 (June 7, 2026)