Tag Archives: 2026

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Keke Palmer, , Naomi Ackie, , , , Will Poulter,

PLOT: A gang of shoplifters develop a vendetta against an arrogant billionaire fashion designer and determine to ruin her.

Still from i love boosters (2026)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: For his sophomore feature, Boots Riley takes everything that worked in Sorry to Bother You—absurdist comedy that builds until it approaches surrealism, Oakland grit, an insane third act sci-fi twist, and casually shoehorned-in communist propaganda—and piles it on even thicker. It’s arguable that he piles it so high that the story totters by the climax, but then again, that’s not exactly a disqualifier for a weird movie.

COMMENTS: Fashion—which, as Oscar Wilde quipped, is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it must be altered every six months—is an easy subject for satire. Boots Riley uses haute couture as an entry point to criticize the wider world of capitalism, though he doesn’t skimp on the cheap jokes afforded by crazy attention-getting getups and pretentious gits who value high thread counts more than high IQs. The three (later four) members of the shoplifting consortium known as “the Velvet Gang” are just scraping by financially; Corvette squats in an abandoned chicken shack, and frequently sees herself chased by a giant ball formed from bills and eviction notices. Their crimes aren’t excused so much as minimized compared to the legally-enabled theft practiced by the fashion industry. You root for them like you would for any outsiders fighting against the Man (or, in this case, the Woman).

Everyone in the expansive cast pulls their weight, with Demi Moore’s megalomaniacal fashionista and Will Poulter’s aggressively shallow middle-manager emerging as standouts. But best of all is Lakeith Stanfield, a dreamboat male model who isn’t even given a name in the movie. He’s a left-field oddball in a cast that includes skinwalkers, moguls who work in slanted skyscrapers, and pyramid-scheme cult leaders, and he’s so sexy that whenever the camera tries to focus on him it visibly starts to swoon.

Boots has a message, but he wraps it in laughter and awe. When Eiza González gives a lecture on dialectical materialism in the middle of the movie, it’s integrated into the film’s comic fabric so that it doesn’t seems out-of-place or preachy. You don’t have to buy into the ideology to enjoy the unfolding madness, but Boots wouldn’t be Boots if he didn’t take time out to testify. And just give costume designer  Shirley Kurata her Oscar right now; from Poulter’s color-matched hair and glasses to the swollen with booty shoplifting sweats to outrageous outfits that André 3000 would pass on for being “too much,” she matches Boots’ mania for satire and spectacle. It’s entirely fair to argue that the plot completely loses its bearings by the time the climax at Christie Smith’s eyeball-themed runway gala arrives—some of the details of the capacities of the technology at the center of the plot are so rushed through so that you’re not sure what it’s capable of, and it even gets hard to figure out where the characters are in relation to each other during a chase scene—but that’s a small price to pay to enjoy this explosion of creative spleen. I Love Boosters goes over the top early on, then just keeps soaring higher.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sometimes, you have to let the weirdos do their thing and we should always let Boots Riley do whatever he wants… It is weird, out there, and you may want to suddenly dress in monochrome outfits for the foreseeable future, but there is so much more to I Love Boosters outrageousness.”–Rachel Leishman, The Mary Sue (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MOTHER MARY (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Michaela Coel

PLOT: A pop star seeks out her estranged seamstress to make a new dress for an upcoming performance.

Still from Mother Mary (2026)

COMMENTS: Mother Mary is a pop singer known for her elaborate costumes featuring halo-styled headdresses (a motif she may have recently abandoned). Now, I don’t know modern pop music from Tuvan throat singing (not quite true—I own a Hun Huur Tu album—but you get the point).  But I gather Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary is supposed to be huge, the type of singer whose trysts with NFL stars get featured on TMZ. The Catholic nomenclature obviously recalls megastar Madonna, while her costuming suggests Taylor Swift by way of Bjork. Critics more familiar with this genre than I am often trot out Lady Gaga as an analogue, along with a number of other names that sound vaguely familiar (vague familiarity being the essential currency of popular music). Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film and, coincidentally, also has a Mother Mary role under her belt) supply the generic pop soundtrack.

At any rate, Mother Mary is secretly a wreck. Her last big public performance ended in an embarrassing and concerning platform malfunction, and she’s apparently been in a bit of a slump since. OK, creative crisis, got it. After an unsatisfactory wardrobe session sends her into a crisis of insecurity, she flies off to see her old estranged seamstress, Sam (Coel). What follows is a long sequence of the two women warily circling each other; Sam is not at all happy to see her old friend, but nevertheless passive-aggressively agrees to make her the new dress MM hopes will reignite her creative spark. The film turns into an extended conversation as Sam takes measurements, selects fabrics, and asks her client to do an interpretive dance (without musical accompaniment, because she has sworn a vow to not listen to Mother Mary’s new work). The designer pokes at old resentments, while the idol she helped create desperately (and pathetically) attempts to mend fences. The supernatural twist is divulged about halfway through, but it’s less hauntingly mysterious and more a disappointingly literal metaphor for the women’s shredded relationship. What began as a talky two-hander suddenly turns into In Fabric, but with no humor whatsoever.

It’s no knock on the two principals, who turn in excellent work, but Mother Mary never really finds anything interesting to say about its subject. The best produced parts are the concert clips—which convey a degree of spectacle that suggests why people might actually flock to see the otherwise vapid Mother Mary—and a few ethereal sequences with a flowing red spirit. But the story itself never approaches the profundity of a good Lana Del Rey single. Pop stars are bland, so maybe, by definition, movies about pop stars should be bland—-even when they try to spice things up with bloody symbolism.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Weird’ is a dismissive adjective for things that people don’t readily understand, or for complex work that wears its idiosyncrasies on its bell sleeve. But the writer-director behind The Green Knight and A Ghost Story has taken the most accessible subject imaginable — stratospheric pop stardom — and made something wonderfully, gloriously weird out of it.”–David Fear, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BRIDE! (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Annette Bening, , ,

PLOT: In the 1930s, a gangster’s moll is killed after Mary Shelley’s spirit possesses her and insults important men; soon after, Frankenstein’s monster convinces a mad scientist to animate her dead body as a mate for him, and the outcast pair go on a righteous killing spree.

Still from the bride! (2026)

COMMENTS: Just like ‘s Bride of Frankenstein, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! begins with a prologue in which author Mary Shelley describes her unwritten sequel to “Frankenstein.” Only this Mary is foul-mouthed, angry, and very dead. Despite this handicap, Mary is so determined to birth her untold story that she enters the body of 1930s Chicago party girl Ida as she dines on champagne and oysters in the company of gangsters, overriding the girl’s compliant meekness to speak through her, resulting in Ida being thrown down the stairs to her death. When Frankenstein’s monster (who’s quickly given the nickname “Frank”) comes to town to ask Dr. Euphronious to create a life partner for him, this is the corpse the pair dig up and reanimate. From that point on, Bride Jesse Buckley, amnesiac about her past life, will occasionally be possessed by Shelley’s spirit, surrendering her streetwise Chicago accent and suddenly speaking like a pissed-off Victorian Dorothy Parker on a three-day bender.

The ghost of Mary Shelley (who, recall, was not only a novelist but also the daughter of an anarchist philosopher and a feminist pioneer) quite literally haunts The Bride! Her presence is about one-third literal possession, one-third meta-narrative conceit, and one-third symbolic feminist consciousness, with a touch of comic relief. It’s a strange and bold gambit that sets the unevenly absurdist tone of this oddball Gothic romance, and it provides recent Oscar-honoree Jesse Buckley the chance to reaffirm the fact that she’s the most versatile and accomplished actress working today. Her performance is necessarily schizophrenic, with the script frequently requiring her to switch accents in the middle of a line. Buckley understands the assignment, throwing herself into the role with risk-taking abandon, especially considering that she’s coming off a prestige performance as William Shakespeare’s grieving wife. Here, she embraces the campiness of the material, and her quick turnaround shows a willingness to accept absolutely any challenge and adapt herself to the requirements of the script. Without her in the lead, The Bride! might well have fallen flat on its face, rather than being a divisive work with defenders and detractors on both sides of the aisle. Let’s hope that, having gotten that Oscar under her belt at an early stage in her career, Buckley remains eager to take on these kinds of outré roles.

The rest of the cast largely plays straight man to Buckley’s crazy. Bale is a fine Monster, digging into the traditional loneliness and dignity of the character, playing him in a realistic register and always willing to yield the spotlight to his co-star. Annette Bening’s mad scientist is eccentric enough, but again does not overshadow the Bride. Penélope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard also play it straight as a pair of detectives on the monster couple’s trail, advancing the film’s secondary feminist subplot along more familiar lines. Gyllenhaal’s famous brother Jake delights in a small supporting role as a Gene Kelly type hoofer who dances in the fictional films beloved by Hollywood musical fanatic Frank.

Bride!‘s weirdo energy doesn’t stop with its wackadoo Mary-Shelley-possesses-a-moll premise or its Frankenstein-in-30s-America setting. Maggie Gyllenhaal directs The Bride! like the wannabe cult-film it seems destined to become, scene-by-scene and with little concern for superficial coherence. Sometimes characters are understandably horrified by Frank and his Bride’s gruesome appearances, while at other times these monsters who walk among us are treated as unremarkable. (Despite her cadaverous appearance and disheveled makeup, Buckley finds herself a target of numerous lechers.) At times characters appear onscreen in the various black and white features cinephile Frank insists on catching at every stop. The couple manages to stumble into the only 80s punk-scene venue in 1930s Chicago for a night on the town. An incongruous dance scene in he middle of a black tie gala in which the mischievous Shelley appears to possess the entire entourage serves as a centerpiece.

There’s enough crazy to go around, and along the way, there are as many references to Young Frankenstein and Bonnie & Clyde as there are to Bride of Frankenstein—and for reasons that barely fit, the film’s message is structured around an angry variant of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” philosophy. There is a “normal” story here, but Gyllenhaal eschews it in favor of a directorial philosophy fashioned around, as she has her Mary Shelley put it, being “disobedient and ungovernable.” It’s exactly the out-there directorial effort we would hope for from an actress whom we first noticed in Donnie Darko, and whose best-known acting credit is as a submissive in the BDSM comedy Secretary. Unfortunately, The Bride‘s box office performance suggests that Gyllenhaal may have already squandered her shot at being Hollywood’s next go-to female director, but we’re hoping she will continue to deliver the gonzo goods rather than reforming her “disobedient geometries” by chasing the almighty buck.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a pulpy, punk-rock romantic tragedy that’s chaotic, weird and beautiful, but also confusing and confounding.”–The Cleveland Plain Dealer (contemporaneous)