Steven Benedict casts his keen eye on Steven Spielberg's latest feature.
When Roger Ebert was inducted onto Hollywood’s Walk of Fame on June 23, 2005, he called movies “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.” Ebert knew more than a thing or two about cinema – he was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer, and he is still the only film critic with a star on Hollywood Boulevard – but in that instance, he could well have been describing the cinema of Steven Spielberg.
Whether it’s the intergalactic communication of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the childlike wonder of E.T., the moral awakening of Schindler’s List, the connection between humans and robots in A.I., or between humans and animals in War Horse for almost half a century, Spielberg’s films have been inviting audiences to foster deep connections across difference and circumstance, championing empathy as humanity’s essential and transformative force.
Disclosure Day adds to that canon.
The film comes shrouded in NDA requests from Universal Pictures, and indeed, the trailers have been so very coy that months of anticipation were built around the strong belief that there would be some dramatic reveals and twists throughout. Not wanting to spoil the plot for you, I will confine myself to confirming what the trailers have indicated: a group of agents working for the US government have become whistleblowers to uncover the truth about UFOs.
Those trying to expose the conspiracy include Josh O’Connor and Colman Domingo, and along the way, Eve Hewson and Emily Blunt are recruited to ensure the truth is made known.
After The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters, A.I. and The Fabelmans, Disclosure Day is the fifth film Spielberg has both directed and taken a writing credit on. Fleshing out the story is David Koepp – Spielberg's collaborator on the first two Jurassic Park pictures, War of the Worlds, and the fourth instalment of Indiana Jones – and for the first hour or so, the pair manage to thread a needle between setup and suspense, serving up several sequences that deliberately withhold just enough that we sense things are escalating but never enough for us to guess what comes next. Spielberg has adopted this strategy before with Close Encounters, where separate storylines indicate a vast interconnectedness, and a conspiracy cover-up results in a third-act convulsion.
But while Spielberg orchestrates several set pieces with relish, the setup ultimately creates such a weight of expectation that the mystery’s momentum succumbs to rapid exchanges of exposition and breathless monologues resembling a news report. Which is bizarre because if ever there were a director capable of visualising an idea or punctuating an emotion with a single image, it would be the maestro himself. What results is an occasional literalisation of something wonderful reduced to the obvious: we’re told what to think because the actors name what should remain silent.
More’s the pity because this movie isn’t really about UFOs, aliens, conspiracies, and cover-ups. Instead, those are just MacGuffins that facilitate Spielberg’s fascination with our ability as humans to transcend disparate cultures, customs and ways of communicating. Take note of how often strangers can connect and dissolve the immediate tension between them. And given the global political tensions that are playing out in the background of each scene, it doesn’t take much to see that Spielberg is asking governments and whole swathes of ideologies to seek out common ground rather than fracture along old lines.
It's a somewhat uneven film, buttressed by Spielberg’s customary visual flair and two good performances by Josh O’Connor and Eve Hewson.
Disclosure Day is in cinemas 10th June 2026.
