Digger (2026)

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller

Have I Seen It Before: No. But, tell you what: Check back with me in a couple of days, and I may have a completely different take on the whole thing.

Did I Like It: I feel like I’m lucky that I saw this almost immediately after taking in The Social Reckoning (2026). I came away from that film a little underwhelmed by seeing the seams in the docudrama, and more than a little put off by the fact that it was dramatizing a situation in which we the marginally innocent either have completely lost, or have. not seen the end.

I occasionally can’t help but compare films with similar themes, or ones I have seen in relatively close proximity, but I come to you with this statement: I’m still settling on whether or not I liked Digger, but I’m relatively sure Digger—if it were somehow made into a real-life boy—would have a few things to say about The Social Reckoning.

Is Digger brave? Maybe, but the film would probably blanche at such a description. Is Digger too pretentious for its own good? There’s certainly a way to read it that way, and the film—and the promotional material accompanying it—almost delights in that assessment. The film is primarily—and this might be something of a spoiler*—a commentary on the form of the docudrama. It can be entertaining. It can be, occasionally, illuminating. If it is dealing with a problem, and that problem isn’t ancient history, there’s a fundamental problem. The story can make a lot of noise, and it can make us feel things, but after the story is over, the problem still exists. That can apply to both the calamity brought on by climate change, and also by the fact that Tom Cruise can outrun as many of his demons as he possibly could, but he may still be estranged from parts of his life, and there are always moments where he is not “on.”

So, I’m sitting here still trying to figure out if I liked Digger, but I certainly am still thinking about it. I am prepared to say that counts for something.

*It’s a real spoiler, who am I kidding?

Project Hail Mary (2026)

Director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Brand new movie. I’ve watched over 100 films already this year, and yet the amount of new films I’ve seen is shockingly low.

Did I Like It: I’d be surprised if this one doesn’t make my top five for the year. It’s a brilliantly realized, wildly plausible (not an oxymoron), science fiction epic that people will spend the next few months adoring, the next several months after that reflexively complaining about it, and the next decades feeling the need to show it to anyone we find who hasn’t already seen it.

There’s a deep vein in science fiction that says—perhaps foolishly—that humanity has within it the ability to reach and fix its seemingly impossible problems. It’s fueled the Star Trek series through any number of ups and downs over 60 years. It makes Armageddon (1998) shamefully watchable. Here, there is no guilt. It’s a buddy film wrapped in the work of a scientific think tank. I’d be surprised if I didn’t try to catch it again before it leaves theaters.

The real surprise here, though, is the work of Lord and Miller. They’ve spent most of the the two decades earning a reputation of turning bad ideas for movies—21 Jump Street (2012), The Lego Movie (2014)—into unusually watchable fare. They’ve done that by largely mocking the idea that the movie should exist in the first place, and letting the audience in on the fun. I always sort of suspect that they were fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) because they decided to make a comedy large mocking Han Solo, and that might have hurt Lawrence Kasdan’s feelings. And yet, here they have managed to restrain their instincts and let what works of Weir’s novel work on its own.