BFI London Film Festival 2026 Preview: I Love Boosters
The 70th annual BFI London Film Festival has kicked off in glorious insanity with Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. The Oakland-born rapper and filmmaker’s long-awaited sophomore feature is a familiar blend of social satire and mind-bending surrealism on the heels of his highly acclaimed directorial debut Sorry to Bother You (2018). A self-described communist, Riley’s anti-capitalist politics have already cemented themselves as a blistering staple of his absurdist style, using the grotesque to bludgeon audiences with reality. Setting his sights on the fashion industry, Riley’s I Love Boosters delivers a bitingly hilarious exposé of its exploitative culture in a film that has already set a formidable precedent for the festival.
I Love Boosters catapults us into deranged misadventures of the shoplifting trio: "The Velvet Gang": Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), and Sade (Naomi Ackie). Titular boosters and subsequent resellers of luxury fashion, the group “steal from the rich and give to the poor” in the inner-city of Riley’s hometown Oakland. When a petty act of theft snowballs into a monolithic corporate conspiracy, the group wages a clandestine war against the ruthless billionaire fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore).
With barely a moment's respite, I Love Boosters hurtles forward in a delirious visual odyssey — its distorted production design and drenched maximalism of colour imagining nothing short of a Seussian fever dream. As often as “dreamlike” is invoked to characterise surrealism, Riley may be among the closest any filmmaker has come to capturing the pace and logic of a dream – sequences colliding into one another as time elapses unnoticed, the sheer lunacy unfolding met with unquestioning acceptance. Upping the ante even further from Sorry to Bother You, the film pushes itself to increasingly macabre extremes of science fiction and supernatural horror. Riley doesn't hold back in the slightest in his unflinching depiction of gore and bodily transformations, manifesting the fashion industry’s vanity, corruption and decay as he sees fit. I Love Boosters exists within a slanted reality – recognisable, yet fundamentally askew – a carnival mirror to the injustices it warps.
The true standout of I Love Boosters, however, lies in its performances, the full cast absolutely nailing the film’s brand of comedy with an infectious confidence. Palmer, Paige and Ackie’s chemistry makes for a wonderfully charismatic leading trio, bringing an affable sense of sisterhood to The Velvet Gang that’s near-impossible not to root for. Unsurprisingly, Lakeith Stanfield is similarly as ever-brilliant as Corvette’s dubious love interest “Pinky Ring Guy”, a self-styled intellectual and deadpan womaniser imbued with an obnoxious watchability by the returning actor. The wider supporting players are equally memorable, with Poppy Lee, Eiza González and Will Poulter’s performances all making for scene-stealing centrepieces every time their characters are on-screen. The film simply wouldn’t work with less talent involved, their wholehearted commitment yielding one of the funniest and surprisingly heartfelt films of the year so far.
By its end, I Love Boosters makes for a riotously entertaining comic spectacle. Furthering his reputation as one of today’s most creatively ambitious artists, Riley’s second feature has solidified his status as a bona fide auteur to watch. The film is slated for release in UK cinemas in late October and is absolutely not one to be missed.
Edited by Teddy D'Ancona, Co-Film & TV Editor
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