Trigger Warning: commentary on pedophilia, rape.
Imagine a country where genocide, rape and enslavement of children are so foundational that 250 years later, it still has a president that’s openly guilty of all three. Imagine that there are files—millions of pages of files—with this president’s name on them, filled with detailed and credible accusations of child rape and pedophilia. Imagine we didn’t even need the files to prove this because this president bragged about barging into his female teen employees’ dressing rooms to catch children while undressed. Now imagine that president started an entire war with Iran to prevent the details of him being a child predator from coming to light.
Now imagine that—in the middle of this child predator’s anti-Arab war of distraction— Lance Oppenheim premieres a film about the early 2000s NBC Dateline show To Catch a Predator focused not on catching predators but on how the host Chris Hansen was a megalomaniac who was obsessed with ratings.
You see how this looks, right?
Starring a chilling Robert Pattinson as Hansen, the highly-stylized A24 flick Primetime follows his spiral as he tries to up the ante on the show in order to compete with the ABC megahit Lost in the Wednesday night primetime slot. “They’ve got a polar bear!” Hansen whines while watching a great episode from the show. So Hansen needed a whale. A big fish, high-profile predator sloppy enough to get caught in the show’s devious web of adult producers and actors pretending to be children. Hansen disregards his female lead producer (a wicked Merritt Weaver) and manipulates an emerging actor (Skyler Gisondo) on his road to ratings glory.
Was To Catch a Predator copaganda that made police look like heroes who solve crimes? Yes. Did one of the hunted child predators—who was also a district gotdamn attorney—die by suicide to avoid facing the consequences of child pornography being found on his hard drive during a raid Hansen set up with the police? Sure did. Is reality TV a cesspool where heartless producers thrive? Obviously. Was Hansen a shitty, absent dad, a cheating husband and a toxic boss while also hunting predators? Allegedly!
But Lance, I’m going to hold your hand with a napkin between us when I tell you: none of what Hansen is accused of is worse than being a child predator. So what exactly do you want me to do with this information that Hansen sucks?
“What would have happened if I wasn’t here?” Pattinson’s Hansen asks the question in his final scene. Hansen usually reserves this question for the end of a confrontation with a predator, except this final time, he asks it through tears, presumably full of guilt and shame at what he’s set in motion for a predator to befall before the screen cuts to black. I’ll tell you what would’ve happened: the district attorney would’ve continued to have child sexual abuse material on his hard drive. He would’ve continued to try and meet children online. He would’ve harmed children. And if he worked real hard and put his mind to it, he could’ve been President of the United States one day.
If I was supposed to cry and feel guilty with Hansen by the end of the film, I’m simply not the audience. More dead child predators, I say.
But who is the audience for this?
When zero people from the Epstein files have been held accountable in America; when Trump is literally making it easier for rapists to thrive on college campuses by gutting Title IX just this week; when he’s literally been found liable for rape and finally after years of fighting had to pay his victim $5 million and it barely made a blip in the news; while he mass-murders Iranian children to distract us from the fact that he’s a pedophile—which no one with power seems to care enough to do something about anyway!!!—why is Chris Hansen’s copaganda that was actually catching child predators the topic to make a movie about in 2026? Why this film on this topic and why now? Understanding context and who is served by this film are crucial to media literacy.
“People can say that this isn’t traditional journalism, or that we were working too closely with the police, which are both valid for discussion,” Hansen told Mel Magazine in 2020. But in the end, we preserved the legal cases, served social justice and moved the enterprise journalism needle forward.”
Cops don’t deliver justice to victims; most predators don’t ever see a lick of accountability for their harm. When pedophiles literally run the world, I’m not going to strain my neck worrying about whether the guy who stopped nearly 350 of them—pediatricians, lawyers, teachers, rabbis, sunday school teachers, youth counselors, fathers!— used unethical practices to catch the predators.
Bring down the global pedophile cabal in the Epstein files. Then we can circle back on whether Chris Hansen was an unethical jerk. Until then, I’m changing the channel on Primetime.
Don’t let the bad reviews fool you. Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a genius and Digger is his opus. On the surface, Digger is about a Texas oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell whose insatiable greed and moral depravity leads to a climate catastrophe. Played by Tom Cruise (who’s probably having more fun than he did jumping out of airplanes in Mission Impossible), Digger flips the “save the cat” trope on its head; his dedication to keep alive a decrepit dying cat is not evidence of his humanity, but of his unwillingness to accept inconvenient truths. He tortuously keeps the cat alive just as he keeps drilling for oil in Greenland against his environmentalists’ severe warnings and evidence of death and destruction.
Iñárritu films it as a farce, with gratuitous use of close-up, distorted lens shots of the villainous white American men who are destroying our planet. A fascinating, circus-like score from Cosmo Sheldrake punctuates their choices to doom us all to hell. The immaculate production design bring the farce-within-a-farce to life. After his first opus Birdman, I’d call Digger the ultimate proof that Iñárritu is the master of meta filmmaking. And uncomfortably prescient, writing about an ice shelf detaching from a glacier due to man-made climate change, and American oil tycoons in cahoots with the president colonizing Greenland nine years before Trump and his cronies actually tried it.
I don’t blame the doubters; when the film double-axles into its first twist, I was totally taken out of the movie. I thought the stakes had been completely deflated and perhaps Iñárritu wasn’t committing to the bit and therefore thought I shouldn’t either. Me of little faith. The complaints about the satire not going far enough ignore what’s underneath. Twist after twist make clear that the commitment of Digger is not simply to a skewering of the billionaire class of white American men whose powers combine to destroy the planet. This is a film about the power of art to heal, to grieve, to rage against our reality when we feel hopeless.
Digger is a profound wrestling match wherein Iñárritu wonders aloud whether art in the face of catastrophe is worth it. Why do we bother with craft when the world is falling apart? How many disaster films have already been made with no end to the climate catastrophe in sight? How many sci-fi films warning about the evils of A.I. have been used as blueprints for the evil tech overlords to build the tools necessary to destroy us all? How many millions loved The Matrix in 1999 only to be rendered completely useless when ChatGPT goes down for a few hours? WHAT ARE WE DOING? WHY DO WE BOTHER? IS ANYONE OUT THERE LISTENING?! When all the artist can do is punch up at power with our tiny collective fist while nothing has changed for the better, and fearfully, nothing ever will, what is the point?
Iñárritu argues that art is the point. That even as billionaires rape and plummet the earth of her resources, wipe out millions of people and billions of life forms with their insatiable greed; as the Ellisons gut the film industry with aims of making its zionist white supremacist propaganda, like Yellowstone, Fauda, and CSI:Whereverthefck while replacing us all with robots; Iñárritu argues that it is still worthwhile to make the art. That a change happens in us when we make it. A change happens in us when we consume it collectively. That processing our rage, grief, fear, and love through art together still matters—even if we immediately re-enter our current hellscape when we leave the theater. That it may actually be all we have left in the end.
The world has ended several times before and will again. And after it all, we who survive will continue to do art. The desperate artist in me clings to that message in these desperate times with both hands. Whether this film is worth it, my answer is a resounding yes.
But I do have a few notes. When a white woman outside of my screening at the Academy asked me what the event was for, and I yelled back at her, “Digger!” and her eyes went wide, I thought, yeah, they probably could’ve changed the title of this one. And my girl Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) and my enby Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon) are utterly wasted; this is a movie about evil men, not their victims. But, that’s to be expected. Unlike Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, which is about a dad, this movie is called Digger and is about Digger. So, manage your expectations and enjoy the funhouse mirror.
******* PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN WATCH A 45-MINUTE Q&A WITH TOM CRUISE, ALEJANDRO IÑÁRRITU, JOHN GOODMAN, SAUNDRA HÜLLER BELOW:
There is a moment about mid-way through the unintentionally hilarious Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity where Dakota Johnson’s Lowen and Josh Hartnett Jeremy are on a birthday dinner date. “Are you hating this?” He asks her. “Oh, no, I love this. I’m having a great time.” “Okay, cause I can’t tell,” he responds. “That’s just my face,” Lowen says, as if Johnson is breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the exasperated audience. “I have resting bored face.” Then it occurred to me: Johnson has been trolling us all along.
Throughout the film, Johnson’s Lowen has been blank and expressionless—even after witnessing a heinous car accident where she is splattered with blood. Just moments before she makes this damning comment, I was cringing aloud “she is dry as hell!” It’s not unique to this performance or this laughably bad script. She also tanked The Materialists for me, which was already working with an extremely flawed script itself. After countless critiques of her dead-face acting and non-existent range, (this critique is a favorite), Johnson shows no signs of improving—nor desire to improve—and why should she? The studios keep hiring her. with this film, she may just be embracing the criticism and trolling all the way to the bank.
And why not? Her seasonless acting is exactly what a white Tyler Perry / Colleen Hoover adaptation deserves. Still, it’s a shame for Anne Hathaway, who really gives her all in the title role (I know Tyler Perry is jealous he did not think to call a character Verity and have her struggle with the truth and what’s real, and then be punished with disability for her wickedness first).
Verity is a true crime novelist who writes best-sellers from the perspective of the villain—and comes dangerously close to being considered one herself. Lowen is the femme fatale hired to live in Verity’s home with her husband and son and ghost write Verity’s book series for her. Hathaway’s never been so deliciously evil and it’s unfortunately wasted on a predictable drivel of a script. You see the twists coming a mile away but it takes almost two hours to do the mile! Distressing. It’s supposed to be campy (I hope!), but I don’t think it was intended to be a comedy. Still, at all the moments where we’re meant to gasp, I literally laughed out loud. It’s a ridiculous disaster of a film. You’ll love it.
The most beautiful film—my number one for 10 years until Sinners came along— is back in theaters for its 10th anniversary screening. It’s been restored and remastered in 4K and it is perfect. It’s the first film I ever evangelized for, going to the movies TEN TIMES and paying for friends and family to go see it as well. I bawled my eyes out through the credits every single time. It is absolutely perfect—save for one small thing. I will argue down that in the final scene, Kevin and Chiron should’ve kissed in the kitchen. I stand on that as a missed opportunity for tenderness and romance that was well-earned. #RELEASETHEKISSCUT!
One of my favorite memories is of picking up my father from the airport on Thanksgiving morning and driving him straight to the movie theater to watch Moonlight in 2016. We had a breakthrough conversation about masculinity that has continued over the past decade and I’m forever grateful to the brilliance of Tarell Alvin McCraney and Barry Jenkins for this film. Its spiritual successor, If I Go, Will They Miss Me? is also in select theaters. Make it a double feature and deconstruct toxic masculinity and the patriarchy that keeps men and boys from accessing the depths of love and connection.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
