Tom Cruise’s Digger is a commercial flop – but also the perfect climate film for our time 20 October 2026 at 08:00

Tom Cruise’s Digger is a commercial flop – but also the perfect climate film for our time

20 October 2026 at 08:00

The movie follows Digger Rockwell, whose drilling triggers a vast iceberg that’s five times the size of Washington DC

Digger, the new Alejandro González Iñárritu film, is bombastic, misanthropic and an epic, critically savaged flop. It is also the near-perfect climate change film for our era.

Digger Rockwell, the eponymous protagonist played by Tom Cruise, is a bluntly caricatured Texas oilman blase about the environmental ruin of his drilling, even as it triggers a disastrous splitting of the Arctic ice sheet. This causes a vast iceberg, five times the size of Washington DC, to barrel towards Europe and threaten a devastating tsunami.

The Digger disaster: what an epic movie flop means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood 17 October 2026 at 04:12

The Digger disaster: what an epic movie flop means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood

The Guardian

By: Catherine Shoard

17 October 2026 at 04:12

Unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing and spectacular hubris is predicted to lose $245m. How did this happen?

The fanfare at Digger’s world premiere in London four weeks ago was literal. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their arrival was heralded by the band of the Irish guards’ fanfare team – bugles gleaming, epaulets shining, bearskin bonnets rippling under the lights.

Given the occasion, the band were not overdressed. Joining William (velvet tux) and Kate (chiffon gown, the late Diana’s earrings) to introduce the film was cinema’s longest-reigning monarch, Tom Cruise (Armani), along with a retinue including director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-stars Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. Loyal courtiers filled the front rows: Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and no fewer than three Beckhams (David, Cruz and Romeo).

The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable review – Netflix doc on ‘secret album’ is strictly for super fans 16 October 2026 at 05:00

The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable review – Netflix doc on ‘secret album’ is strictly for super fans

The Guardian

By: Adrian Horton

16 October 2026 at 05:00

The lore of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, once bought by Martin Shkreli, is explored in a rambling film produced by RZA

For every reason except one, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the seventh album by the Wu-Tang Clan, should’ve been a commercial hit. The 31-track double album, recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013, reunited all of the remaining members of the hallowed Staten Island rap crew and featured eye-catching collaborators from the standard (Redman, offshoot group Wu-Tang Killa Bees) to the unexpected (Cher, Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten). The sound, at least according to those involved, harkened back to the glory days of the group’s beginnings in the 90s.

But for years, almost no one heard it. The group only issued a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – on CD, ensconced within layers of filigreed silver – with the stipulation, in legalese, that it could not be used for any commercial purposes for 88 years. The decree, either a stunt or a bold artistic statement on streaming’s devaluation of music, depending on your generosity and perhaps your net worth, succeeded in drumming up plenty of hype. And if you were anywhere around the blogosphere or cable news in 2015, you may recall that the beneficiary of that hype – the purchaser and thus single intended listener of this $2m musical treasure – was one Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” widely despised for gleefully hiking the costs of prescription drugs for profit.

Dogmatic Nordic liberals v eastern family values: culture-clash drama Fjord touches nerves in Norway and Romania 16 October 2026 at 02:00

Dogmatic Nordic liberals v eastern family values: culture-clash drama Fjord touches nerves in Norway and Romania

The Guardian

By: Andrei Popoviciu and Magnus Nome

16 October 2026 at 02:00

Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes winner echoes the news story of a Romanian couple whose children were taken by the Norwegian government. As it heads to London film festival, two writers explain how the film exposes real hypocrisies

When Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord was shown in Romania as a one-day preview this June, the reception was extraordinary. Across 53 towns and 96 cinemas, the film reportedly pulled in over 40,000 viewers in a single night, a number arthouse cinema rarely sees in Romania. But the response here had little to do with cinema. It felt instead like a reopening of a familiar fault line about the clash of values within the EU itself.

Rebellion review – story of Bradford 12 revisits Britain’s ugly racist past 15 October 2026 at 06:08

Rebellion review – story of Bradford 12 revisits Britain’s ugly racist past

The Guardian

By: Peter Bradshaw

15 October 2026 at 06:08

Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood’s documentary recalls the fight against racism in 1980s Britain – even if its account of solidarity has a notable omission

This fierce film from socialist film-makers Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood gives us the story and the context of the Bradford 12. Twelve south Asian members of the United Black Youth League in 1981 were arrested on a charge of conspiracy to cause explosions for possessing dozens of molotov cocktails – milk bottles filled with petrol, with a rag through the lid – allegedly for throwing at the police. To the intense irritation of the British authorities, a mixed-race jury acquitted them, accepting their argument that it was in self-defence (and that the items themselves were closer to fireworks than bombs), because black and Asian communities were routinely and systematically attacked by skinheads and racists whose activities were shrugged at by the powers that be.

It is a reminder of a particularly ugly, squalid, bigoted and mediocre era in British public life, when Margaret Thatcher, just before becoming prime minister, tried to siphon off some of the far-right National Front’s political energy by declaring that people felt “swamped” by immigrants, the most earsplittingly loud dog whistle in Tory history. It was also the era when anti-racist protester Blair Peach was killed by the Met’s yet-to-be-disbanded special patrol group, when the still-unsolved New Cross fire in London took the lives of 13 young black people, when the south Asian woman Anwar Ditta was subject to a spitefully obstructive move from the Home Office to prevent her bringing her children into the UK – supposedly because they weren’t really hers, though a DNA test finally proved her right. Perhaps most of all, it was an era when the witness-box testimony of uniformed police officers was increasingly seen as almost valueless in these cases; the film also reminds us how culpably lackadaisical and incompetent the Yorkshire police were in catching the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.

How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire 14 October 2026 at 09:34

How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire

The Guardian

By: Alastair Ryder

14 October 2026 at 09:34

Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?

It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.

Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?

String Theory for Computers 13 October 2026 at 04:49

String Theory for Computers

MetaFilter

By: kmt

13 October 2026 at 04:49

"Did I read this paper? Of course not. No one at OpenAI read this paper either, so why should I? I did what every other mathematician in the world does with AI slop mathematics: I fed it back into the slop machine and ran an information retrieval session with a chatbot interface to extract salient facts. Anthropomorphically speaking: I asked ChatGPT what it thinks about its own output. This is how we do mathematical research now. What a world."

"Unfortunately, I did not find a faster Fourier transform. Instead,l I found the rot that develops inside applied mathematical theory when formalism becomes so detached from reality that a "breakthrough" is nothing more than an artifact of mathematicians not being able to properly specify the rules of their games in natural language." The orange website is not impressed, but I'd give more credence to the author - he did not drink the kool-aid and can write.

Digger on course for $245m loss after box office collapse 12 October 2026 at 08:51

Digger on course for $245m loss after box office collapse

The Guardian

By: Andrew Pulver

12 October 2026 at 08:51

Estimates suggest the eco satire starring Tom Cruise could join the list of top turkeys, including Cutthroat Island and The Marvels

Digger, the ambitious eco-fable starring Tom Cruise and directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, is heading for an even worse financial outcome than previously thought, with reports suggesting it will lose around $245m (£185m), placing it among the biggest disasters in movie history.

According to a report in Variety, Digger’s estimated second weekend revenue in North America of $3.2m is a 60% drop on its opening weekend figure of $8m, meaning its current domestic gross is $14.4m, for a global total of $35.3m, with a projected final box office total of around $50m worldwide.

A kind of "secret currency," an "esoteric knowledge" 6 October 2026 at 04:47

A kind of "secret currency," an "esoteric knowledge"

MetaFilter

By: chavenet

6 October 2026 at 04:47

If these characters fail to successfully inhabit the world, it is at least in part because their world—the world as theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida had taught them to see it—isn't one that is easily inhabited. How can a person make a home in an impersonal symbolic field or an ineluctable power machine or a network of deceptive and unstable signs? What kind of human flourishing is possible in such an inhuman universe? What kind of a life?

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