Comics Reviews, ETC

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.

PLEASE NOTE: several of my keyboard keys are going out intermittently, so I’m going to suck at responding to comments for a while. 😩😩😩

Backrooms (2026). A furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an entrance in the store basement to a seemingly endless series of uncanny office rooms.

The second huge horror sleeper hit of the summer! Although maybe not a sleeper to those paying attention, because this movie is adapted from a wildly popular series of CGI Youtube shorts by teenager Kane Parsons, who also directed this movie at the age of 20. The last I saw was that its opening weekend receipts might beat The Mandalorian and Grogu’s from last weekend, which is just incredible. (LOL Disney.) The word is that this is getting huge number of middle and high schoolers into the theater. I know my local theater has been nearly sold out, and I saw it in a nearly full theater. It’s wild, honestly; I’m not used to going to movies that other people want to see, too!

Anyway, this movie is maybe the purest expression of Vibes™ that I’ve encountered in a horror movie in a long time. The horror here is: what if empty rooms? What if the 90s? (This is also a period movie, by which I mean it’s set in 1990.) But most importantly: what if empty rooms that are apparently infinite and don’t make any sense? The comparison used in the film is “What if you described a dog to someone who’d never seen a dog, and then you asked them to draw it?” Stairways go nowhere and carpeted ramps lead to tiny, Alice in Wonderland scale doors with three doorknobs. Furniture is stuck in walls and floors. And everything is very bright and very yellow.

What this movie does not do is clutter up all those vibes with, say… a plot. That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve seen too many horror movies that feel the need to pull some bullshit plot out at the last minute to justify their existence, and Backrooms is confident enough to eschew all of that. It does have a narrative structure as we follow first furniture vendor Clark and later his therapist around the treacherous backrooms, learning things about them (or at least making conjectures which are never confirmed or denied by the film itself). Some people die, because of course you can’t have a labyrinth without a monster or two. There aren’t even many jump scares, though the whole atmosphere of wrongness is so intense that I spent the whole movie clutching my blanket very tightly.

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Saccharine (2026). A med student (Hana, played by Midori Francis) starts taking a weight loss pill made from human ashes and becomes haunted by the ghost of the person she's consuming.

Francis is absolutely the star of the show here and does a great job portraying Hana's insecurities. I also really enjoyed Danielle Macdonald as her friend and fellow med student Josie. The movie also has a clear cinematic vision for how it tells its story.

As for the themes, I don’t feel fully qualified to make a judgement one way or the other, but here are some thoughts.

( spoilers and a BUNCH of stuff about weight loss and fatphobia )