Disclosure Day
First screened and reviewed in July 2026
Director: Steven Spielberg. Cast: Josh O'Connor, Emily Blunt, Eve Hewson, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Wyatt Russell, Elizabeth Marvel, Jeremy Shamos, Tommy Martinez, Hettienne Park, Gabby Beans, Emily Jackson, Margo Seibert, Elizabeth Stanley, Clarke Thorell, Brandon Wilson, Jim Parrack, Courtney Grace. Screenplay: David Koepp, from an original story by Steven Spielberg. In Brief:
Director, writer, cast all give an impression of digging deep but the ideas feel messy and naïve. Mishmash ending.
VOR:③
If you jump on, I think Spielberg conveys you toward ideas and sensations worth exploring. But it's all too easy to give the ride a pass.
And this is what it takes to get a solo female news anchor live on American TV! (Two, in fact!)
I did have this thought while the finale of Disclosure Day unfolded, but posting just this feels too flip for my up-and-down, unconvinced, but slippery and intrigued relation to this film...
If World War III were actually transpiring, and they cut into coverage of that to tell me that the US government had hidden the alien truths about Roswell for decades, I would be pissed. The furthest thing from my mind would be a rekindled sense of wonder. The furthest thing from the warring nations' minds, I am positive, would be a laying down of arms.
I also had this thought while the finale of Disclosure Day got even gooier and less convincing, but I really don't want to leave this weird-ass movie for dead...
I think Disclosure Day might in some ways be Spielberg's Megalopolis? I don't mean that as sheer put-down, even if both projects strike me as sort of mad, and it's hard to ignore the marked drop-offs from almost everything I love in both masters' signature films. But what gets me in both cases is the undeniable sincerity with which Coppola and Spielberg approach these discombobulated tales, which simultaneously build and squander momentum. They really want to say something to us, and as much as I question the coherence of what they're saying, the impulse to hail us so directly and the unshaken faith in a dwindling medium are really gripping.
It's hard to delineate who seems more exhausted, Josh O'Connor or Janusz Kamiński. Emily Blunt has clearly worked hard on this performance and scores some good moments, tonally ("you were in jail??") and technically (all those languages), but I never believed this character. I'm glad Spielberg is such an After Life fan, and maybe David Koepp is, too, but that whole element of cinematically recreated memories falls so flat, doesn't it? As do a weirdly miscast Colin Firth's efforts to do... whatever he is doing.
Still, I like that the movie was interested in religious belief, and tugged in curious ways at what we mean by both of those words. I loved Courtney Grace as the New York news anchor in the live-feed climax. I liked not being able to peg exactly where Elizabeth Marvel's nun character was coming from. I liked the crazy verisimilitude of how a car might bend like a ball of crumpled foil around a high-speed train that just smashed into it, even in a movie with no grounding relation to verisimilitude. I liked... honestly, just a few days later, I can't remember a ton that I liked, or a lot about Disclosure Day, period. Close Encounters aspirations, sort of, that only generate War of the Worlds and Ready Player One results.
But I still sensed that the movie meant a lot to Spielberg, and he wanted it to mean something to us. Not as much as Coppola wanted Megalopolis to mean to us, and for better and worse, Disclosure Day is neither as ambitious nor as baffling nor as erratic in its relation to basic competence as Megalopolis was. But maybe I'm a sucker for an ingenious old-timer who wants to grab me by the collar and drag me into his improbable but deeply earnest riptide of optimism, amid these hopeless times.Grade:B–
(I originally wrote this piece on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
