It is not just Digger’s cat that’s incontinent; it’s the whole movie. The catastrophe that is the Tom Cruise vehicle Digger is excessive in almost every way but, primarily, it is, like nearly all major productions now, simply much too long, running to over two hours. These days, only 7 per cent of movies come in under 90 minutes, once the norm.

One director not succumbing to this inflation is Paweł Pawlikowski. Fatherland (82 minutes) is the third film in a loose trilogy that began with Ida (also 82 minutes) in 2013, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and continued with Cold War (88 minutes) in 2018, which won Pawlikowski his first Best Director award at Cannes. 

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