Tag Archives: 2026

366 Underground, Interviews

366 UNDERGROUND: MATADOR BOLERO (2026)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Rosado

FEATURING: Yves Tumor, , Jack Irv, Stephee Bonifacio

PLOT: A high-profile murder at a nightclub triggers various factions into action, including a computer intelligence from the depths of space.

Still from Matador Bolero (2026)

COMMENTS:  Matador Bolero looks good in that DIY, retro kind of way, at times feeling like a down-at-the-heel Koyaanisqatsi with a nebulous crime story tacked on. But I would like this filmmaker—and his team—to consider a project stripped of a plot, or at least stripped of explication. The murder of a beloved actress at the beginning isn’t nearly as important as the camerawork capturing the fascinating motion of the topless dancers and their viewers. Yves Tumor is better with ardent bed-dance performances than meekly relaying cryptic “information” to an overzealous detective (Kansas Bowling, whose physicality is not well served by dialogue in this film). And the young blonde pulling a magician’s handkerchief from a notch in the beach? I am on board with all of this—except for one thing,

To clarify, I’m a “style-over-substance” kind of guy. I revel in cinematic excess, be it sets or sound production or costuming, or what-have-you. But Matador Bolero is one of the few films where I actually became somewhat annoyed when substance cropped up. What is this narrative you’re trying to tell? Who are these recurring characters? Shoo, shoo. Rosado is in his element when he’s playing around in post-production to further dreamify his already dreamy shots and vignettes. Three scantily-clad young women in wolf masks pursue a fourth (non-masked) woman down a sinister corridor and tear her dress to ribbons while a purple-glowing super-intelligence orb thing pulsates conversationally? I don’t need a “Why” for that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“So there’s our justification for the film’s the title, but are we still feeling confused? Almost certainly; Matador Bolero is confusing by design – if we accept that the film is much more about blending moods, impressions and visual styles than telling a story… a bold project but a strange prospect, pushing the boundaries in what feels like both experimental, but recognisable ways, and coming up with something off-kilter, but visually strong.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026)

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Recommended

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)