Film Roundup 01/10/2026

Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we run through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: dodgy billionaires, haunted ghost writers and young lovers…

Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.

Digger

Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an eccentric billionaire whose arctic drilling projects inadvertently kick off a potentially apocalyptic environmental disaster. Can the wealthy elite scramble to correct the problem before it’s too late?

The early trailers for this focused less on the film and more on its star, looking back through Cruise’s on-screen career with a sense that it all led to this. And it certainly looks like he’s having a lot of fun here, caked in so much makeup and prosthetics that it makes his Tropic Thunder character look almost normal (fun fact: Digger is meant to be in his 60s – all that makeup is just to make him look the age Tom Cruise actually already is). His performance is big and brash and cartoonish, lampooning the generally weird personalities of real-world billionaires. The rest of the cast is having a similarly good time, including John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons.

The reviews haven’t been as kind as I was expecting, with some praise for the performances and overall craziness, but mostly concluding that it fails as an effective satire on both climate change and the excessive power of the wealthy. It sounds like director Alejandro Iñárritu’s film is a little too pleased with itself but lacks the substance to justify it. Still, this looks like loads of fun, and in a world where climate change seems to be increasingly, wilfully ignored, anything that pulls it back into the public conversation deserves some praise.

• Digger on IMDB
• Digger on Rotten Tomatoes

Verity

Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is hired as a ghost-writer to finish the final novel by renowned writer Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) by Verity’s husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). Verity herself is confined to a wheelchair and unlikely to walk or talk again. But when Lowen finds a file that appears to be Verity’s autobiographical notes, it reveals secrets about Jeremy that pull her into a world of suspicion and paranoia.

Anne Hathaway is this year’s Pedro Pascal, having appeared in seemingly half the films in the cinema over the summer (Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street, and now this). She’s a great actress and often a sign of a good film, although she doesn’t seem to have so much to do in this one despite being the eponymous character. Dakota Johnson on the other hand is a perfectly good actress who seems to have a knack for picking bad films, like 50 Shades of Grey and Madame Web. Which star’s track record will overpower the other here? It certainly looks intriguing – it’s based on a book by Colleen Hoover, an author best known for her romance novels, but seems to play out more like a psychological thriller that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Expect lots of twists and turns as more secrets get revealed.

However, based on the reviews it sounds like this sits more at the Madame Web end of the Hathaway-Johnson scale. It currently has 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critics saying that the final act doesn’t quite satisfy the set-up. Still, if you’re a fan of the book, or of thrillers generally, it looks like there’s fun to be had here.

• Verity on IMDB
• Verity on Rotten Tomatoes

Girls Like Girls

Based on the single and novel by writer-director Hayley Kiyoko, Girls Like Girls follows Coley (Maya da Costa), who moves to a new town following the death of her mother and meets Sonya (Myra Molloy). The two feel an immediate mutual attraction but their relationship is scuppered by self-doubt and a reluctance to accept their feelings. Over the course of a long summer they start to overcome their apprehension and embrace their emotions.

Although it’s not the most original idea for a story – there are plenty of films about whirlwind summer romances between young lovers and you can probably predict how it plays out just from reading the title – it looks like a sweet and affecting example of the trope. The two leads seem to have real chemistry. The biggest name in the cast is Zach Braff as Coley’s father, who’s best known as a comedy actor but has shown plenty of times on Scrubs that he can bring the (sacred) heart when he needs to too. This has a very solid 87% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics praising the dreamy nostalgic feel and the themes of teenagers trying to figure out their own lives.

• Girls Like Girls on IMDB
• Girls Like Girls on Rotten Tomatoes

If you only see one film this week…

…tunnel your way out to see Digger.

Still in cinemas and worth a watch

• Heart of the Beast – A beautiful soundtrack from Jared Michael Fry, stunning shots of the Alaskan wilderness, a great performance from Brad Pitt, and one of the loveliest dogs you’ll see in the cinema all make this a must-watch. You know the dog will be OK, but the journey he and Pitt go on and the challenges they endure to get there include some real heart-in-the-mouth moments that make you question that reality. It’s a bit heavy-handed towards the end in wringing its audience’s emotions, but it’s still effective – by the time the Einaudi music kicks in there won’t be a dry eye in the cinema.
• Resident Evil – Comfortably the best Resident Evil film, Zach Cregger’s adaptation, whilst it may stray from the canonical story, is loads of fun. Austin Abrams gives a very believable performance as an everyman trying to do the right thing when everything around him is descending into chaos – you genuinely feel for him by the end of the film, even when it hits the crescendo of ridiculousness that seems to have become Cregger’s signature. It’s an effective horror film but it’s also very funny in places and overall just a very fun movie.
• Hope – To get the one criticism out of the way first, there is some bad CGI in Hope. Like, really, distractingly bad. Its monsters are brilliantly designed but when they move there’s a weird weightlessness to them that makes it difficult to suspend any disbelief that they were a physical presence on the set. But, that being said, the filmmakers do a fantastic job of holding back on showing them for a good chunk of the movie, relying instead on some fantastic practical effects and set design to show the aftermath of their destruction. There’s also some really funny dialogue, especially everything said both by and about Im Hyun Shik’s Mr Hae-sul. The ending turns into a different film entirely and gives you just enough insight into Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender’s characters that you’ll be wishing for a prequel and a sequel from their perspectives. Cut the CGI some slack and this is hugely enjoyable.

Trailer of the Week

Having already given an incredible performance recently in Pressure, Andrew Scott’s next film looks like it could very well catapult him into Oscars territory. In Elsinore, he plays Charlton Heston as he prepares for and delivers a performance as Hamlet at the National Theatre, while starting to succumb to the AIDS that took his life shortly afterwards. This looks incredibly emotional, both in the tragedy of what Heston was dealing with and the triumph of what he achieved in spite of it, and Scott has the perfect range to convey that. The cast also includes Olivia Coleman, Johnny Flynn, Billie Piper and Peter Mullan. We’ll see whether Elsinore will be (or not be) in awards contention when it takes the stage in January.