Critic Reviews

A movie that reminds viewers that blockbusters can be morally and thematically complex while they’re entertaining the hell out of you.

It’s a cracking good thriller.

In Disclosure Day, cosmic truth does not arrive as salvation or doom, but as a question of whether humanity can still hear something beyond its own terror. The film’s answer is fragile, luminous, and deeply moving: maybe awe is what survives when we finally stop shouting.

I think Disclosure Day will be divisive as hell. I loved it, because this thrilling film is all about its questions, not its answers. That is the mark of a true elder statesman’s wisdom.

Disclosure Day isn’t really about the action, exemplary as it is; it’s about connection — human and otherwise — and about Margaret and Daniel slowly realizing what they know, and how they can use that knowledge for good.

Such is the ultimate effect of Disclosure Day, a great film from our greatest director that feels guaranteed to only get better the more people discuss it and mull over its intentions.

Disclosure Day is another Spielberg blockbuster triumph, a welcome return to the genre he’s always been best at, and a genuinely spine-tingling, soul-searching experience that leaves us wondering less about aliens and more about how we can learn to listen to, understand, and have empathy for each other.

Disclosure Day weaves these ideas and more into what seems to be a straightforward action film with some sci-fi elements. And given that this is Steven Spielberg, he doesn't give us answers but leaves us with some hopeful things to contemplate.

This movie is made for a world that has us spending most of our time looking down, whether metaphorically, heads buried in our own work and struggles, or literally, absorbed by the phones that have overtaken our lives. As if watching the skies is too big an ask in that context, Spielberg instead uses all his directorial power to encourage us to look at each other. The result is another great film in a career filled with them. Structured like a thriller with a propulsiveness worthy of Indiana Jones, Disclosure Day is an attempt to meet this cynical, divided moment and treat it with empathy, as well as with a healthy dose of good, ol' fashioned entertainment.

Steven Spielberg proves why he's the greatest blockbuster filmmaker of all time with a full-circle aliens-among-us thriller that dazzles as both a pedal-to-the-metal chase movie and a moving reckoning with the idea that we aren't alone in the universe.