Esse Est Percipi

Gonna just catch up all in one post.

I Love Boosters (2026). Three professional shoplifters develop a grand plan to take down fashion maven and general asshole Christie Smith (Demi Moore).

This is Boots Riley’s sophomore outing. If you’ve seen his first film Sorry to Bother You, you know that you’re in for a colorful, satirical, absolutely bonkers time. If you haven’t, the closest other analogue I can think of is Everything Everywhere All At Once, except this is less about interpersonal relationships and more about the power of collective organizing.

It’s hard for me to talk about this film beyond the sum of its parts, so let’s talk about its parts. Riley LOVES color. There’s so much color. For a while Corvette (Kiki Palmer) and co are working in one of Smith’s own upscale fashion stores, which sell exactly one color at a time. The lighting is very colorful. The costuming is amazing and also colorful.

The score is incredible and may be my favorite part. You NEED to listen to the opening credits; it tells you basically everything you need to know about this movie.

The movie has a bit of a slow start, but it really kicks into gear when a brand new plot element arrives at about the halfway point, and by the end I honestly felt a little weepy, because how many movies are there about collective action???? Much less ones that are bonkers and fun and amazing?

Also Lakeith Stanfield is there. He's a [spoiler]. So you have that to look forward to. :')

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Is God Is (2026). Twin sisters go on a mission to murder their father, who set their mother on fire and left the sisters with burn scars.

First-time film director Aleshea Harris adapted her own play in this movie, and I will definitely be watching out for what she does next, because this is stylish and full of flair and ambition. The whole film has a sort of mythic feeling about it that reminds me a bit of O Brother Where Art Thou. The people we meet along along the way are each a necessary component of the sisters' journey, and each one feels a little bit uncanny. I love the use of text on the screen

The relationship between twins Racine and Anaia is the heart of the movie, and it's great. Anaia is more heavily burned, and Racine is her fierce and sometimes unwanted defender, a hot-tempered woman yearning for meaning who finds it when they're summoned by their dying mother, whom they had thought was already long-dead. "We're on a mission from God," Racine says at one point, calling out another great road trip classic. When Anaia protests, Racine says, "Our mama is like God, right? She made us."

The movie also has stuff about misogyny and domestic violence specifically among Black families, which I'm not qualified to comment on, but it too is wrapped up in heightened storytelling that I really enjoyed. Sterling K. Robinson is extremely menacing as their abusive father.

I will say that I was disappointed by the ending, both from a thematic and character perspective. But the ride up until then was great. One of my favorite movies of 2026.

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Carolina Caroline (2026). Caroline, a girl in smalltown Texas, falls in with a traveling con man, and they go on a road trip to find her estranged mother and do some crime along the way.

I watched this for my girl Samara Weaving, who stars as Caroline. However, in terms of movies about Kyle Gallner driving around committing crimes, I kept wishing I were watching The Passenger instead, which had a way more interesting relationship between its leads. I kept waiting for more meat to Caroline and her relationship with Oliver, and we just never get it. She's starry-eyed and a little naive, and she has abandonment issues. Somehow this leads to bank robbing. IDK man.

I wanted the movie to have more ambition. There are no surprises at any point, except maybe the decision to move from small-time cons at the beginning to suddenly robbing banks at gunpoint, a big tonal shift that goes unremarked by the movie. These aren't even bank heists, just regular armed robbery.

If you're hankering for a Bonnie and Clyde style thing, you could do worse, but maybe wait for streaming.

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Buffet Infinity (2025). Sometime circa the 90s, a sinkhole opens in the parking lot of an upstart new buffet, and in perhaps unrelated events, people start disappearing.

The most important thing about this cosmic horror movie is not the plot as such, but the fact that it is told (almost) entirely through TV commercials. This is a heck of a gimmick for a 90-minute feature film, and I will be honest, the movie did not quite pull it off. Towards the end it starts cheating, both with filmed segments that it's hard to imagine would ever actually go on TV (why not just film another take?) and a handful of scenes that didn't appear to be in-universe footage of any kind.

However, cheating aside, the movie managed to keep my attention through the entire runtime through however many, many 30-second to 2-minute clips. There are a few recurring characters, local businessfolk whose ads become progressively more unhinged and suggest more and more about the events, and I definitely had my favorites. (I ADORE Ahmed's terrible pawn shop raps.) The ads from the buffet also get more and more uncanny and over the top, but I think a big strength of the movie is playing on how so many real life ads already feel uncanny and fake; it just doesn't take much to tip that over into outright horror.

I can't say the ultimate reveals involving the L Ron Hubbard expy really worked for me. If anything, I think the movie should have had less plot and explained less. (See: Backrooms.) However, I kind of want to rewatch it from the beginning now that I know where all the plot threads are going, so I can better appreciate what it's doing.

Honestly, with a premise this unique, I don't think it matters if the movie is entirely successful. If "cosmic horror movie told through fictional ads" sounds like your jam, this is still absolutely worth your time.