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This weekly cinema roundup features reviews of new releases, including a bombastic satire directed by Alejandro González Iñarritu where Tom Cruise portrays a Texan oil tycoon, a psychological thriller titled Verity starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, and a narrative about a brilliant but misunderstood architect.
If you’re heading to the cinema or just your couch, our reviewers have you covered with the new releases you need to know about each week.
If you’re stuck in a hole and somebody hands you a shovel, what do you do with it? The obvious if reckless answer is “keep digging” – and there in two words you have the philosophy of Digger Rockwell, the swaggering Texan oil tycoon played by Tom Cruise in Alejandro González Inarritu’s bombastic satireGrey-haired, pot-bellied, pale as a corpse, Digger is outwardly the opposite of the eternally youthful version of Cruise seen leaping between rooftops in thefilms.
But both versions embody the can-do American spirit, refusing under any circumstances to concede defeat. That attitude has its downside, as we learn when one of Digger’s technicians calls from an oil rig in Greenland to inform him of a methane leak that’s opened up a crack in the ice. Verity means truth .
It also happens to be the name of a bestselling crime fiction author, Verity Crawford , whose novels tap into her own thoughts and longings and anti-social impulses to such a degree that her husband Jeremy stopped reading them after the first one, because he didn’t want his perception of the woman he loves to be tainted. Is the book version of her the truth, or the version he knows?
The story isn’t Verity’s, though; its narrator and central character is Lowen Ashleigh , also a novelist, but very much at the other end of the publishing mountain. We first meet her as she’s doing an apologetically hushed-voice reading in a sparsely attended book store, interrupted when one of the attendees gets a phone call.
“Sorry,” the woman says. “Sorry,” responds the timorous Lowen. , another riveting tale about a brilliant architect who feels misunderstood and underappreciated by those who pay for his visions to be made, literally, concrete. The similarities extend to a trip to the quarry in Italy from whence Carrara marble is sourced, a visual centrepiece for both movies.
The big difference, though, is that while Brady Corbet’s film – which won three Oscars, including best actor for Adrien Brody in 2025 – is fiction , the French movie is firmly anchored in fact. President Mitterand peers through a model of the building designed by Danish architect Johan Otto van Spreckelsen in The Great Arch.
) as Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the Danish architect selected in 1982 as winner of a competition to design a major new building as the centrepiece of the La Defense business park in Paris. If you’re heading to the cinema or just your couch, our reviewers have you covered with the new releases you need to know about each week.
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