News You Can Bruise for 2026 November

Making this one quick because it's already well into November and I'm about to go see the new Godzilla movie.

• Digger (2026): I feel like this film has been pretty well Rounded Up by others, since the only people who saw it were the people who post their movie opinions online. So I'll just give you my most idiosyncratic takes:
  1. As with Ishtar, it's really hard to keep the audience's attention with deliberately bad art. Digger spends most of its runtime in this territory, and in-universe I can buy it getting to "so bad it's good" status, but for us it reads as simply bad.
  2. The people who make movies have one thing in common: they really like movies and watch a lot of them. So whenever you're watching a film and you see a movie poster used as a prop, you'd better take notice. In this case the poster is for To Be or Not to Be (1942) and it really jumped out because in Digger it's found in a playhouse, where you wouldn't expect a movie poster.

     I'm not the only person who noticed this poster; here's an essay comparing the two movies. What I'll add is that To Be or Not to Be is a movie about a world-historical catastrophe, made during the catastrophe by people who were living through it. Looking at Digger through that lens makes it feel a little more... not optimistic, but sympathetic.

  Better than Birdman, is what I'm saying.

• To Be or Not to Be (1942): Rewatched to validate the above take. I remember this movie being a laugh riot, but there's actually not that many funny scenes. The genius of this movie, and the reason I remember it being funnier than it is, is that Lubitsch realized he could direct a spy thriller as if it were a bedroom farce. People are always running around in disguises, impersonating each other, hiding in ridiculous places, speaking in double entendres. I didn't notice this back in 2021 and I'm wondering if there are other movies like this, maybe movies I've already seen.
• Backrooms (2026): I loved the art direction here. Just amazing. The screenplay was meh but I feel like horror movies generally have meh screenplays. You could argue there's a "no true Scotsman" thing where a horror movie with a good screenplay, like Alien, gets reclassified as not-horror. But I would argue that a good screenplay requires the introduction of non-horror elements, so that it's not a 90-minute attempt to make you feel the emotion the genre is named after.

  I came into that paragraph thinking I had my opinion locked down, but then I thought of a good counterexample: The Shining. Good screenplay, good movie, nothing but horror. So I dunno.

  But, speaking of Kubrick, I wanted to take this opportunity to shout out my friend Kris Straub, whose work has greatly informed the "liminal horror" and "low-fi horror" aesthetics that you see in e.g. Backrooms. I was there at the start so I'll let you in on a secret: this stuff ultimately comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). What is the Discovery but a liminal space, a space in transit, full of other, creepier, liminal spaces? Shakycam footage with heavy breathing, abrupt quiet violence, silent observers, weird shit that's just never explained... it's all there in 2001.

• Buffet Infinity (2025): Recommended by JustWatch when I was looking up Backrooms, so I went for it the next day. Guess what I have to say about this low-budget horror movie? The screenplay's bad! But the framing device made it a pretty fun watch, and the eldritch evil at the end is a cute piece of puppetry, like if the Langoliers were Muppets.

Next time: Godzilla!