Boots Riley makes films the way few others dare to — loud, lurid, funny, furious, and unmistakably his own. A rapper, activist, and longtime frontman of the hip-hop group The Coup, the Oakland artist arrived in cinema fully formed with Sorry to Bother You (2018), a surrealist satire of capitalism, code-switching, and gig-economy desperation that became a Sundance sensation and one of the decade's sharpest debut features.
Riley followed it with the Amazon series I'm a Virgo (2023), an audacious coming-of-age story about a 13-foot-tall young man in Oakland — a show that smuggled radical politics inside a giant, joyful visual swing. His work blends magical realism with working-class reality, treating the absurd as the most honest lens on how power actually operates.
His latest, I Love Boosters, lands in theaters this month — a Bay Area fashion-heist comedy following a crew of women shoplifters who lift from luxury stores and resell to the people priced out of them. It premiered at SXSW to a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, with critics calling it as funny as it is thought-provoking — and, in Riley's words, a film built to both "compel" and "repel" you.
Other Notable Films // Sorry to Bother You (2018), I'm a Virgo (2023, series), I Love Boosters (2026).