Dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu · 2026 · about 128 min · in cinemas
Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate with a taste for taxidermy. Per the synopsis, he is "the most powerful man in the world" and must prove he is humanity's saviour before a disaster of his own making finishes the job. Reviews describe the opening: a methane leak and a cracking glacier at a Greenland drilling platform, and an ice mass that threatens to drift toward Europe, while Digger answers the scientists with sports metaphors and asks for more production. Riz Ahmed, John Goodman and Sandra Hüller lead the supporting cast. Emmanuel Lubezki shot it in VistaVision; Cosmo Sheldrake wrote the music.
That is as far as this review goes. Reviews hint at a structural twist to come, and it is better met cold.
Even the harshest reviews grant the look. NME calls it "a visually striking piece of cinema", and the film's reputation as a large-format spectacle (IMAX and VistaVision screenings are part of the release) is the least disputed thing about it. Cruise is the second point of near-consensus: early reactions praise how fully he commits, even where the jokes do not land, and the supporting cast gets similar credit, with Ahmed repeatedly singled out as the moral counterweight.
The admirers are real. One wire-service review gives it three stars out of four and calls it "a 'Dr. Strangelove' for the climate change era", "as urgent as 'An Inconvenient Truth' but a whole lot more operatic". A major-studio release that attempts this at all, that review notes, is uncommon.
The same ambition is the charge sheet. Variety's Owen Gleiberman writes that "Digger isn't funny", and The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney finds it smugger than Don't Look Up. NME's verdict: "rather messy", "a big disappointment" though "not irredeemably awful". The criticism is not unanimous in direction either: from the other side, National Review's Armond White calls it a "failed conceit" that teeters between mocking climate alarm and exaggerating it. A satire attacked from both flanks is either well aimed or aimed at nobody, and which you believe is the whole argument.
The resulting collaboration is a visually striking piece of cinema. Unfortunately, it's also a rather messy one.Lou Thomas, NME
On the aggregate, the film sits around the middle of the scale, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting roughly half of critics positive at the time of writing. IndieWire's Jim Hemphill is on the high end, calling it one of the most visually inventive and daring studio pictures; Empire's headline calls it a "disappointing waste". The score below sits where the evidence does: an ambitious, handsome film whose comedy, by the account of most who dislike it, does not land.
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Go if you want a large-format spectacle and a performance in a fully committed register, and can forgive a comedy that misfires. Wait for home viewing if you need a satire to be reliably funny or quiet in its politics: this one is neither.
In cinemas now in the UK and US, with formats including IMAX and VistaVision-equipped screens in some places. Release dates and formats vary by country, so check your local listings.