Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Two titles from the recently concluded Seattle International Film Festival, quickly considered.\
I Love Boosters
Writing about Boots Riley's 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, I said it "manages to have at least one daft thing going on every three minutes or so." That rhythm pales in comparison to I Love Boosters, which erupts even more frequently with zany ideas that run the gamut from MTV to Jacques Tati, a nonsensical approach to reality that isn't so much dadaism as doodad-ism. There is no question about Riley's imagination, although one could argue that stretched into 105 minutes, the nonstop gaggery begins to wear one down a little.
I could describe the story, although it would take me a while to sort that out, but it's better to go into the movie cold anyway. A group of Oakland women (Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige) are in the garment trade (they steal clothes and re-sell them), a famous designer (Demi Moore) becomes their nemesis, and a woman from a Chinese sweatshop (Poppy Liu) joins them, in ways that should not be blurted out here. The movie also has LaKeith Stanfield, whose close-ups throb with his character's sheer vibe-ness, and Don Cheadle, who seems to be enjoying himself. And a raft of other people.
I Love Boosters may spark the same kinds of debates that Riley's previous film did: Do the film's excursions into fantasy and magic detract from its ideological thrust? Is that ideological thrust so blunt it tilts the movie away from its fun? Is the whole thing just a big mess? The film embraces nuttiness to such an extent that the fineness of these questions becomes not especially relevant. What matters is that Riley has, for one key location, created a skyscraper that tilts at an alarming angle, and then takes us inside to visit the fashion magnate's apartment, which has floors so steep the inhabitants must lean and crawl and grasp at handholds. It is a great idea, and does not stop being funny.
Silent Friend
The notion of a movie with the evocative title Silent Friend, which focuses on a tree located in the courtyard of a German university, is somehow better than the actual film that results from this. At least, this is true of the movie I began conjuring up when I heard about Silent Friend. I admit I imagined something about the beauty and implacability of trees, and of the kinds of things that could happen around one of them; by the time Ildikó Enyedi's film was revealing the boundaries of its three stories, I had a sense that this movie was going to remain earthbound—and not bound to the earth in the way of trees, either.
Silent Friend aims at lofty, often fanciful targets. But one problem is that its stories are uneven in their interest, and uneven in the time we spend with each one. During COVID, a researcher (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) is stranded in Hamburg when the pandemic hits, and as he idles he dreams up various means of "reading" the tree. Another story, set in 1908 and shot in black and white, tracks a woman (Luna Wedler) defiantly applies to become the college's first female science student, and succeeds. The other story, the most dramatically malnourished, is set in 1972 and gorgeously shot on film; its young people are absorbed by a very curious botanical experiment and, to some extent, by each other.
This movie is going to find an audience; it means well, and is made well. There is something rather precious about it all that rubs me the wrong way, which, strangely enough, is about all I can remember about Enyedi's My Twentieth Century (1989), which a lot of people liked, too. This particular gingko tree should be interesting for the way it illuminates the more transitory humans who come into its proximity from time to time, but they remain underwhelming by comparison.
May 22, 2026
