Typically, when a new Tom Cruise movie comes out, the reviews are instantly in his favor. Upon release on October 2, 2026, viewers didn’t know what to expect from his newest film, Digger. Before it was even released, it was theorized that the film might secretly be a musical. Well, it didn’t turn out to be true, but it has still been a shocker nonetheless, as it’s received shockingly bad reviews. The film has won the approval of one movie reviewer, though. It’s not one you’d expect. The godfather of grunge, Neil Young.
On October 8, 2026, Neil Young penned a raving review for Diggerdirectly on his website. He stated, “Digger is the best film I have ever seen. None of the reviews I have read describe this film adequately, in my opinion. They seem to miss the overall effect, and most of them are negative. This film lives in a world of art. It is its own best review. Don’t read any other reviews and forget this one before you see Digger.”
You’d think that pretty much sums up his feelings for the new film, but he didn’t stop there. He then went into great detail in three more paragraphs. He claimed that looking at the film as just a Tom Cruise film is “misleading,” stating, “I do not view this film as a commercial venture. Rather, it is an artful film of our times. The things that are said in Digger are a direct reflection of today’s political and social world. The film is so full of artful expression and radical change ups that it may be too much to take in for those expecting a commercial film like we are used to today.”
Neil Young’s Glowing Review CONTRASTS The Box Office Results
Despite Neil Young’s praise, Digger has been a historic box office flop. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $8 million in North America. This is Tom Cruise’s lowest opening weekend in decades. The film cost an estimated $160 million to $180 million to produce. The studio spent roughly $100 million on marketing alone, even though no one knew what to expect from the apocalyptic black comedy. I mean, we didn’t even know for sure that it wouldn’t be a musical. The film is expected to gross around $50 million worldwide, losing roughly $245 million for Warner Bros. Pictures.
Neil Young does make some good points in his assessment, though. Movie lovers have been pushing something unique and different for quite some time. He praised the film for being “Artfully created and directed” and added, “This story is so familiar that it may be missed. It is today’s world of politics and commercial overload. A must-see for those frustrated by the lack of genuine engagement present in much, if not all, of today’s offerings. Digger is not to be missed.”
Of all the tawdry delights in “Verity” — Michael Showalter’s adaptation of bestselling author Colleen Hoover’s massively popular psychological thriller — the best and most unexpected is how well the film hides its secrets. Now, don’t get me wrong: The movie isn’t exactly garnering Oscar buzz, or even eliciting the fervent “you’ve got to see this!” refrain that followed 2014’s “Gone Girl” around. “Verity” is trashy fun through and through, and doesn’t try to elevate itself past that pulpy baseline. But Showalter and the movie’s screenwriter, Nick Antosca, are skilled in the art of misdirection. They know how to surprise, and they use their trio of actors to do it cleverly.
Take Anne Hathaway, fresh off a string of box-office smashes in “The Odyssey,” “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “The End of Oak Street” and “Mother Mary.” (Alright, the last one made a few pennies and a nickel, but we can dream.) This year alone, Hathaway has repeatedly proven her versatility, jumping between gun-toting moms, tortured pop stars and struggling journalists. In “Verity,” she plays the titular character, Verity Crawford, the author of a string of hit thriller novels who’s been mysteriously incapacitated after a car accident and can’t finish her final three books.
(Dave Allocca / Starpix) Josh Hartnett attends the “Verity” New York Premiere
Hartnett stands out among the roster of stubborn, uncompromisingly masculine leading men from his heyday, proving that there’s much more to winning over an audience than simply playing into the public’s perception.
To complete the series, Verity’s publisher taps little-known writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who agrees to step into Verity’s place using her copious notes. While Johnson’s elasticity as a performer is a bit more contentious, I’ve always found her choices fascinating — oscillating between rom-coms, superhero films and arthouse horror with the bat of a mascara’d eye. “Verity” is no different, allowing Johnson to move her character between suspicion and warmth with languid ease as she settles into Verity’s Vermont home to work.
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But the key piece to the “Verity” puzzle is Josh Hartnett, who plays Verity’s put-upon husband, Jeremy, with all the unnerving capriciousness a film like this demands. Here, Hartnett’s character exists in flux, somewhere between his old life and a new start. He’s both charming and chilling, expertly using a near-imperceptible shift in expression or tone to keep the audience on their toes. With Hartnett weaving through the entire story, it’s nearly impossible to get a handle on what’s really going on in “Verity.” And that volatility is what makes the film so exciting, even when it goes full-tilt cheesy.
This is nothing new for Hartnett, who’s spent the last few years enjoying a well-deserved career renaissance, following up his role in “Verity” with a starring role in Netflix‘s supernatural thriller miniseries, “Below.” Once the quintessential ’90s heartthrob, Hartnett has parlayed the goodwill from his hunky idol days into something far more compelling. Though he’s always been a great actor, popping up here and there to elevate material, Hartnett has found an artistic sweet spot, using his effervescent charm and boy-next-door-all-grown-up good looks to subvert expectations. Hartnett stands out among the roster of stubborn, uncompromisingly masculine leading men from his heyday, proving that there’s much more to winning over an audience than simply playing into the public’s perception.
For those who have watched Hartnett grow throughout his career, the actor’s keen yet unassuming abilities surely don’t come as a shock. His late ’90s breakthrough in the triple-hitter lineup of “Halloween: H20,” “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides” catapulted him to international fame practically overnight, cementing his place alongside the era’s Tiger Beat celebrity infatuations. The primary difference between Hartnett and his contemporaries, though, was that Hartnett could hold his own on screen. He may not have had the bona fides of someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, but Hartnett’s work was consistent and appealing. He knew how to play the everyman (or everyteenager), caught up in frequently absurd or abrupt situations beyond his control.
That’s not to say they were all hits, of course. 2002’s “40 Days and 40 Nights,” an offbeat rom-com about a Bay Area web designer who chooses to abstain from sex and masturbation for the duration of Lent, is patently ridiculous and more than a little sexist. But that’s also where Hartnett’s appeal lies. He understands how to use his innate magnetism to charm his way through even the silliest scripts, occasionally creating a dissonance between the film and his performances that makes even the duds memorable.
(Netflix) Josh Hartnett as Calvin in “Below”
These days, I can’t say the same about some of Hartnett’s early peers, like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, who, despite rising to fame earlier than Hartnett, never fully figured out how to separate themselves from their reputation. Both Cruise and Pitt have a death grip on their A-List prestige, hyper-aware of how much the world perceives and enjoys their work. That self-awareness has made their late-period work all too stodgy, selecting roles clearly informed by their notable reputations. Take Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” and this year’s “Heart of the Beast,” where Pitt plays hypermasculine characters whose lives, actions and goals are defined by a relentless desire to come out on top. For someone whose notoriety has twice become inseparable from who he’s married to, Pitt’s choice to play gruff loners feels noticeably calculated, keeping an arm’s distance between his work and the audience.
For Hartnett, shading in a complete picture, warts and all, is essential to making a character believable. It’s an old-school way of thinking for the modern era — a belief that the work should be taken seriously but without ever letting the viewer in on how intensely he’s considering it.
In Cruise’s case, artistry seems to have taken a backseat almost entirely. Over the last decade, Cruise has resigned himself to action stardom, writing death-defying stunts into his contracts. Even with “Digger,” Cruise’s most ambitious project in years, he confines himself to a loud, obnoxious character destined to be written about as a “big swing.” The problem is that “Digger” only feels like a big swing because it’s marginally different from what Cruise has been doing lately. Cruise’s ambition is moot if he’s otherwise resigned himself to crowd-pleasers, making his occasional enterprising choices look even more daring.
Comparing Hartnett to actors like Pitt and Cruise might seem like a stretch. But consider that “Verity” topped last week’s box office by a wide margin, leaving “Digger” and “Heart of the Beast” eating its dust. No doubt this is partially due to Hoover’s extreme popularity, and Hathaway and Johnson’s bankability — those are fair elements to incorporate here. But when it comes to the difference in performance among all three leads, there’s really no competition.
Hartnett’s work is dynamic and unsettling, making what could be a forgettable tertiary character into an integral part of the story that viewers hold in the back of their minds, even when he’s offscreen. From the start, when Jeremy runs into Lowen on the street before they meet at Verity’s publisher’s office, Hartnett makes Jeremy’s presence feel dubious. His every motive feels ulterior, and his inevitable simmering romance with Lowen resembles a can of worms that could pop open at any moment.
But that’s Hartnett’s great skill. He understands how to keep viewers vigilant, how to shock them and startle them as soon as they think they know where he’s headed. He doesn’t just subvert expectations; he perverts them, creating characters who appear to have rich inner lives and plenty of secrets that the audience may never fully understand. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2024 thriller “Trap” used Hartnett’s expertise to its full potential, crafting a character who could be both a doting dad and a vicious serial killer at the same time. For Hartnett, shading in a complete picture, warts and all, is essential to making a character believable. It’s an old-school way of thinking for the modern era — a belief that the work should be taken seriously but without ever letting the viewer in on how intensely he’s considering it. With Hartnett, what you see is never what you get, at least not fully. And what a delight it is that this world still holds some surprises for us.
To film Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s new movie “Digger,” a satirical black comedy about an aging oil tycoon facing a potentially apocalyptic crisis he fathered, Tom Cruise needed extensive prosthetics — six hours of prosthetics, to be exact. Upholding his reputation as the most intense person in any room, Cruise has proudly touted that, by encouraging the makeup artists (and running drills with them using a stopwatch), they worked the entire process down from six hours to less than one. As this is basically unheard of, the anecdote plays great on a press tour. But Cruise’s story is also an ironic reflection of “Digger”: an undeniably ambitious project whose assuredness conveys a stubborn disregard for everyone but itself.
Typically, that kind of thing isn’t so bad in a movie. More filmmakers would do well to be so confident in their vision that they successfully tune out intrusive thoughts about what anyone else will think, refusing to dull their boldest ideas and temper their biggest swings. But “Digger” complicates this certitude, weaving its audience into the fabric of its story so tightly that they’re bound to their seat, forced to sit with their eyes peeled open as Iñárritu points his finger back at them. His thematic concepts and narrative red herrings rely on the viewer’s presence. Without us, there is no one to hoist blame upon when the film reveals its layers, no one to compare to the film’s wide-eyed spectators of global collapse.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) Tom Cruise in “Digger”
Iñárritu reduces our connection to art to a distraction. While that notion may be true for some, it’s not universal, and Iñárritu’s haughty assumption only reflects how disconnected “Digger” is from the very reality it presumes to understand well enough to satirize.
“Digger” can’t be a great film on its own; its success relies on generating strained discourse, on the cowardly option to chalk up its seismic errors in judgment and smug self-satisfaction to a difference in intellect. “This film is supposed to be annoying,” it argues time and again. “It’s supposed to move at a slug’s pace, and be lit with the putrid pallid color of a corpse’s husk. If you don’t get that, you must not be able to understand that this movie is already our reality.” To make a movie about the end of the world that asserts the viewer needs to understand their own complicity assumes an uncharitable worldview that keeps a vertical mile’s distance between the art and its spectators. With “Digger,” Iñárritu commands — to quote “Real Housewives of New York” alum Kelly Bensimon — “You come up to me; I don’t go down to you.”
But I’ll play ball. Americans did, of course, elect Donald Trump a second time. It’s fair to assume many of us require a stern talking-to, like dogs who need their pills hidden inside the cheese that is Cruise’s Mr. Movies persona. But the problem with Iñárritu’s approach is that he’s fashioned “Digger” as a satire for a post-satire world, a state of living where every day is almost comically bleak. The more glaring issue, though, is that he seems to think this is a novel concept, one he can mine with a twist that strips “Digger” of its parts to examine the relationship between the audience and the artistic outlets (like this very movie) they use for a blip of respite between the horrors.
Once Iñárritu peels the skin off, he resumes taking cheap shots at the exposed wound, reducing our connection to art to a distraction. He assumes that, these days, the public goes to see movies or plays, watches television, or reads books either to avoid this dismal reality or absolve themselves from it. While that notion may be true for some, it’s not universal, and Iñárritu’s haughty assumption only reflects how disconnected “Digger” is from the very reality it presumes to understand well enough to satirize.
Saying all of this broadly without context would be an argument as compelling as Iñárritu’s — which is to say, not very. That does, however, mean that a key spoiler for the film, which occurs about 40 minutes into its runtime, is just ahead. If you would prefer not to know more, pause here. (But bookmark this page to return to, won’t you?)
Iñárritu spends the film’s first quarter setting the scene and characters — strangely quite literally, raising what looks like a stage curtain but is revealed to be a window shade. Cruise’s Digger Rockwell rises from bed and tries to feed his bizarrely acting cat before learning of an explosion on his oil rig in Greenland. Lively scientist Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns Digger that the explosion has sent a massive ice shelf toward Norway, which will flood the coasts and hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s only the beginning. The explosion has triggered more movement, with another glacier headed toward Alaska. To avoid panic and stay ahead of the narrative, Digger meets with the president (John Goodman) and the military to discuss next steps.
As Digger and the president peer out a window, a light flickers. A tree in the distance falls, and a giant hand emerges from the ground to put it back in place. Iñárritu reveals that all of this is rehearsal for a new production of the cult-classic play “Fossil Fools,” about a real-life climate disaster and its players who changed the world forever. Digger and all the characters we’ve met so far are actors. This explains their blowhard nature. Their constant screaming and yelling is a feature of the play’s meta-satire. Unfortunately for us, the film’s audience, it doesn’t make watching the rest of the rehearsal any more enjoyable.
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If anything, the “twist” — in quotes because I tend to see anything that occurs less than an hour into a two-plus-hour film as a plot point rather than a twist — blunders the viewer’s goodwill. The jokes are less funny because they don’t occur within the film’s natural rhythm. The overacting is exhausting because it’s not only Iñárritu’s creative choice, but rather the methods employed by the play-within-a-movie’s director. Every single frame of “Digger” is thrust through an extra two meta layers. This is an interesting exercise for the filmmaker, surely, but the rest of us are stuck waiting for Iñárritu’s larger message to come into play. Placing the narrative left turn so early into the film almost feels like a tactic to curb theatrical walkouts.
Those who resist the urge to use their precious time doing anything else will be rewarded not with payoff, but indictment. You there, yes you, the one sitting in seat 11E; you’re no better than the doomed dunces coming to see this production of “Fossil Fools.” Like them, you want the satire to make you feel smart, to make you feel like you’re one of the good guys? Too bad. By simply continuing to exist and endure this life you didn’t choose, you are no better than Digger Rockwell.
(Warner Bros. Pictures) John Goodman in “Digger”
Iñárritu portrays the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality. His film has ill will spewing from every pore, a complete loathing for humanity. Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end. Tell us something we don’t know.
The film, of course, doesn’t say this in so many words. But it doesn’t have to, either. Cruise’s character is an intentional parallel to his own cinema-championing schtick, an actor who believes every scene he’s in should carry some semblance of the truth. But when he argues veracity’s importance, the play’s producer, Kenny (Jesse Plemons), reminds him truth doesn’t matter to the audience. The people are coming for catharsis. They want to cheer on Digger’s demise. This momentary cleanse won’t save them, but it will keep them going.
There is no shortage of ideas to dredge from this truth, about how we use art to cope, sometimes to our own detriment. When “Digger” briefly strikes this resonant note, its warring aspects begin to coalesce, before Iñárritu strikes them with a shovel and breaks everything up again. Just after the opening night’s audience gets their emotional release, a tone fills the theater, with a voice cautioning of a “Level 4 warning.” (What convenient timing, this happening after the play has finished!) Without surprise, the audience dons their luxury PPE — branded “LUNGZ,” complete with a cutesy “Z” at the end, because all these sheep adapted to their new normal so willingly — and makes their way into war-torn streets patrolled by drones and robot cops. Roll credits, roll eyes.
As if this whole affair weren’t self-satisfied enough, Iñárritu jabs his finger at the audience one last time. After about 90 seconds, the film’s end-credits song is interrupted by the same “Level 4” warning, this time aimed at the viewer trudging out of the theater (or, in the near future, asleep on their couch).
In a film full of contrived indignities, this is the most maddening, suggesting that anyone watching the film is no more clever than the “Fossil Fools” audience members. Iñárritu portrays the average person as a seal, ready to bark and clap at anything that so much as alludes to reality. His film has ill will spewing from every pore, a complete loathing for humanity. Yes, we all have some level of complicity in the world’s eventual end. Tell us something we don’t know.
Riffing on the human need for emotional engagement through the arts with such venom is not just a slap in the face; it’s evidence of Iñárritu’s gnawing insecurities. By lampooning the desire to see our experiences in art without crafting any emotional resonance of its own, Iñárritu comes off as unjustly malicious, upset that his films are too sprawling and cluttered to pull off that connection consistently. How brutally ironic that “Digger” is Warner Bros.’ last film before being swallowed by Paramount–Skydance. It may have ambition, and it may have exactly the kind of role Cruise needs to pursue. But the film merely gestures to its own unfortunate place in history, without ever cementing it as a tragedy. Dig into one’s ideas too much, and eventually they’ll become hollow.
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