With fall film festival season heating up and the awards race poised to start, it’s easy to get tunnel vision when it comes to the year’s best films. The past few months have heralded the arrival of several splashy pictures, each all but guaranteed a glitzy awards season run. But what about the films that premiered earlier in the year, the ones that might have slipped through the cracks in the developing awards conversation? Some might fade into obscurity, but others — with the help of a well-timed physical release — will soon get new leases on life.
I Love Boosters is one such film. Though it’s easily one of the best of the year, its March release came and went. The second feature from writer-director Boots Riley, it’s part-heist, part-zany social satire, with visuals so saturated and trippy it circles back around to abject absurdity. Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu are the film’s titular boosters, lifting goods from a Bay Area designer (Demi Moore) who’s long taken advantage of the disenfranchised. Their crusade couldn’t be timelier, but I Love Boosters is more than its jagged sociopolitical statements. It’s also just a really good time at the movies, and it’s finally getting another chance to remind us.
