Neil Young calls Tom Cruise's Digger the best film he has ever seen
Neil Young has called Digger, the new film starring Tom Cruise, "the best film I have ever seen."
The musician published the verdict on 15 October in the Letters/Artists/Bandstand section of his Neil Young Archives Times-Contrarian newspaper, Neil Young Archives. In the same post he described it as the greatest film — work of art he has seen.
Young said none of the reviews he had read described the film adequately. Most of them were negative, he wrote, and they missed the overall effect. He argued that Digger lives in a world of art and is its own best review.
His advice to readers was blunt. Do not read other reviews. Forget his review as well before seeing it. Just go and see it for yourself.
Young described Digger as a film of our times. Cruise plays the main character, Digger Rockwell, an eccentric oil tycoon. Young wrote that the things said in the film are a direct reflection of today's political and social world.
Digger is directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Rolling Stone reported. Cruise had pitched it to cinema owners in April as a "wild" dark comedy, Reuters reported. It took four decades of acting to get to a place where he could play the role, he said at the time.
That long build-up led to a red-carpet premiere attended by Cruise. The event generated early talk around Cruise as a best actor contender.
The praise arrived during a mixed start in cinemas. Two weeks after its theatrical release, Digger had taken roughly $38 million worldwide. Variety reported that it would need $350 million just to break even.
Its score on Rotten Tomatoes, the site that aggregates critics' reviews into a percentage, had risen to 53 percent at the time of Rolling Stone's report. The film was the last release from Warner Bros. before it merged with Paramount.
Young is not its only high-profile backer. Jane Fonda, Guillermo del Toro and Anne Hathaway have also thrown their support behind it. Warner Bros. Pictures promoted Digger as a cinemas-only release in October 2026.
What makes this stand out is the gap. The ticket sales are soft. The endorsements keep coming, and Young's is the loudest yet.
