Demi Moore’s haute-couture maven attracts the attention of a gang of contemporary Robin Hood type clothes robbers in Riley’s fashion biz satire

Here is an entertaining, if very exhausting fantasy-caper about the fashion biz from Boots Riley, a madcap mile-a-minute melee of unadulterated ker-aziness. You might need a couple of ibuprofen and a lie-down afterwards. Demi Moore perhaps thought she was here getting a gamey starring role, comparable to her Oscar-nominated turn in the beauty-industry satire The Substance. In fact, the way the film is structured and edited, Moore is hardly more than a returning cameo, though a potent one.

She plays Christie Smith, a billionaire couture designer who has an office in a trendily designed city block which leans over at an experimental angle. Christie is the object of obsessive attention from “boosters”: supercool young outlaw women who, nettled by her arrogance, shoplift her clothes from upscale stores and sell them on at knockdown Robin Hood prices. They are Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), the latter having the ability to, by holding her breath, turning herself into a white woman who is less likely to be challenged in a store; an interesting metaphor for what Frantz Fanon might have called black skin, white masks.

Our critic picks out some of the most outstanding cinema screening at the UK’s most prestigious film event in 2026

This film puts Andrew Scott in line to become the first out gay man to win the best actor Oscar. He plays Ian Charleson, who became a star in Chariots of Fire and in 1989 took on the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre when Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew, despite being desperately ill with Aids, knowing that the strain would accelerate his illness. For Charleson, the play’s themes of life and death, truth and falsehood, justice and injustice, were all too real.

Over 40% of films in LFF programme are female-made, but only two of 21 gala films are directed by women

Female film-makers are still being squeezed out of the industry as they progress beyond their debut films, the director of the London film festival has said, adding that “the dial does not seem to be moving”.

Kristy Matheson’s comments came as LFF announced its full programme for this year’s event, which runs from 7 to 19 October. Of the 251 titles, 109 (43%) are made by female film-makers, but only two of the 21 gala films are directed by women.

Old favourites Shaun the Sheep, Dune, Jane Austen and Godzilla join Charles de Gaulle, the Peasants’ Revolt and queer identity in Spain

• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here
• Big tech goes to Hollywood: is Silicon Valley ready for a silver-screen reckoning?

All release dates are UK and subject to change

Willem Dafoe is typically grizzled and poetic for this study of a near-retirement postal worker who, it turns out, was a beatnik rhymester of cachet – but no lasting renown – back in the day, and who has now been rediscovered by a new generation of literary hipsters. Director Kent Jones, adapting a novella by Arthur “La Ronde” Schnitzler, was the longtime head of the New York film festival; he might be in for a spot of late fame himself. AP
• 4 September

The outspoken musician and film-maker talks I Love Boosters, his colorful follow-up to 2018 hit Sorry to Bother You, and the criticisms of his partnership with an Ellison

Don’t call Boots Riley an anti-capitalist, at least not without qualification. “I’m a communist,” he clarifies. “A lot of stuff that calls itself anti-capitalist is doing so because they’re afraid of calling themselves socialist or communist or something else.”

But the one-size-fits-all label persists for a reason. From his early work with the Coup, a subversive hip-hop group that gleefully mocked the genre’s prevailing culture of wretched excess on albums like Kill My Landlord and Genocide & Juice, Riley has made art that treats capitalism less as the operating system for daily life, complete with its expected bugs, than an axeman lurking under the bed.

The Sorry to Bother You director’s brash and outrageously funny new film, led by Keke Palmer, can be a little too scattershot to make an impact

Back in 2018, rapper and activist Boots Riley made his feature film debut with Sorry to Bother You. It’s a caustically funny satire about racial and economic disparity, following a telemarketer played by LaKeith Stanfield, who puts on a “white voice” to succeed. But it also has horse people. That was, for me at least, the point when Sorry to Bother You threatened to break the spell, even in an absurdist fun-house mirror of our fraught world that Riley makes his soapbox.

The brash film-maker doesn’t make it easy to love his gonzo agitprop. That’s part of his whole appeal, really. He dares us to resist and gets away with it because he’s such a compelling and necessary voice.

Awarded to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, other recipients include S Shakthidharan, Adam Ehrlich Sachs and Kei Miller

British novelist Gwendoline Riley is among eight writers set to receive $175,000 (£130,000) each in recognition of their life’s work.

Australian playwright S Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, is also among those selected for this year’s Windham-Campbell prizes, which award $1.4m annually to writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama, with the aim of enabling them to focus on their work free from financial pressures.

Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Lately I’ve been going back to read some classic works that I had, in my zany life-arc, missed, in the (selfish) hope of opening up new frequencies in my work. So: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (the zaniness seems to lack agenda and yet still says something big and political); then on to Speak, Memory by Nabokov, newly reminded that language alone (dense, beautiful) can power the reader along; and, coming soon, The Power Broker by Robert A Caro – a real ambition-inspirer, I’m imagining, in its scale and daring.

Wheatley’s engaging tale sends Sam Riley’s tough-guy reporter to the home of a reclusive oligarch who has invented a ‘Brain Collider’

On a modest budget, director Ben Wheatley gives us a retro sci-fi with much tongue-in-cheek paranoia, questioning of reality and proliferation of multiverses, and featuring comic-book dialogue that’s been re-recorded, giving the whole thing a sheen of dreamlike unreality. There’s also a lot of quirky lo-fi special effects work with Airfix models.

Bulk is a movie indebted to a mountain of pop culture references listed in Wheatley’s own handwriting in block capitals over the closing credits. Space: 1999 is one – it is good to see it there, and see it reflected in the preceding film – and with the monochrome cinematography, Dutch angles and looming closeups there’s a bit of John Frankenheimer and a little of Chris Petit. The film is massively self-indulgent, often funny, rescued from its not infrequent longueurs by its stars, those very likable performers Alexandra Maria Lara and Sam Riley, who are a real-life married couple.