What To Watch If You Loved (Or Hated) Digger

By now you’ve likely heard that Tom Cruise’s new movie, Digger, is a box office bomb. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s climate satire, starring Cruise as a blustering, Southern-drawling oil tycoon, opened to $8 million domestically. A week in, it has made about $25 million worldwide against a budget reported at $125 million to $180 million. Audiences gave it a C+ CinemaScore. Critics split down the middle at 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Even if you’ve seen it, you might still not be sure what the movie actually is. (Fair warning: this list assumes you have, so spoilers ahead.) Before release, the internet convinced itself Digger was a secret musical, thanks to a trailer shot of Cruise on a rotating stage and a few suspiciously open-mouthed extras. Studio sources denied it; Cruise told Jimmy Fallon a Digger musical was “a very good idea.”

The sleuths weren’t entirely wrong. Digger isn’t a musical, but about half an hour in, it turns out to be a play within the movie, with Cruise as an actor playing Digger Rockwell. I saw it opening weekend, and it’s stranger than any musical could have been. It’s also the best movie of the year. I understand why not everyone has joined Digger nation, though. The movie is hell-bent on making its audience uncomfortable, harried, and confused.

Whichever side you landed on, here’s what to watch next.

Class warfare is the obvious parallel in Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture winner, but the real link to Digger is the feeling of wrongness that builds from the first scene, a dread that keeps tightening even while you’re laughing. It’s striking that a Korean director and a Mexican one, working from very different countries, land on the same sensation: being dragged breathlessly along by forces much bigger than you.

Watch on Paramount+ or free on Kanopy.

If Digger is the climate satire that refuses to tell you whose side to be on, Adam McKay’s comet comedy is the version that tells you in the first ten minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists nobody listens to, and the movie walks you straight into “us good, them bad” smugness. Watch it to see what Digger would look like if it were two layers less clever. Bong Joon-ho, for the record, counted it among his favorites of 2021.

Watch on Netflix.

Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Guillermo del Toro are the “three amigos,” the defining Mexican directors of their generation, so Cuarón is a natural next stop. His dystopia imagines a near-future Britain where no child has been born in 18 years, and it looks like nothing else from its era. Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Digger, works in long, unbroken takes built entirely to serve the apocalypse. If Digger’s dread got under your skin, this is its closest ancestor.

Rent on Apple TV.

Paul Thomas Anderson cast Adam Sandler as Barry Egan, a small-business owner with seven overbearing sisters and a temper he can barely hold down. Then he built a romantic comedy around him that plays like a slow-motion car crash. Jon Brion’s score keeps your pulse up throughout, and every scene carries the same quiet warning: this cannot hold. It’s a short movie spent entirely on tilt.

Watch on Prime Video.

If Digger was too much, try Iñárritu at a smaller scale. Michael Keaton (a former Batman actor himself) plays a washed-up superhero actor attempting a comeback, and the film is engineered to feel askew, stitched together to look like one continuous take. It’s no less confusing than Digger—even maintaining the play-within-a-movie conceit—but it’s less ambitious, and the stars hew much closer to who they are. That makes the swing a lot easier to follow.

Watch on HBO Max.

Poor Things stars Emma Stone as a woman reanimated in the body of her dead mother, discovering the world from scratch. So, yeah, Yorgos Lanthimos makes movies about as strange as Iñárritu’s, but he always stays one level removed, with his eye on the joke. The movie is askew in every frame, but you’re never alone with the discomfort, because Lanthimos lets you laugh. That ironic safety net is what keeps it from Digger’s heights, but if Digger was too much, Lanthimos has the right dose.

Watch on Hulu.

Jason Reitman’s satire skewers the same breed of corporate spin as Digger, but it keeps everything light and tidy. Aaron Eckhart is terrific as Nick Naylor, a Big Tobacco lobbyist so smooth and charming you root for him against your better judgment, and the movie ultimately lets its silver-tongued liar walk away pretty much fine. If you wanted the critique of excess without footing the bill, this is it.

Rent on Apple TV.

And if what you really missed was Tom Cruise, here he is. Michael Mann’s thriller stars Cruise as a gray-haired hitman who commandeers Jamie Foxx’s cab for one long night of jobs across Los Angeles. It’s utterly clean, a true flick: relentlessly kinetic, but it knows exactly where to breathe. Foxx’s role is a reminder of how good an actor he is, and Cruise, playing it completely straight, is just as intense as anything in Digger.

Watch on Prime Video or Peacock.