Disclosure Day

Grade: A

Disclosure Day is like hearing an exuberant 5 year old kid telling you “I have the best story! Wait’ll you hear this!” Not everything tracks, the logic isn’t always logicing, but you are won over by the kid’s wide-eyed enthusiasm – and you go from smiling, nodding, and placating to being on board with the story. Inside Steven Spielberg has always been that child who can’t wait to tell you “the best story.” Disclosure Day swings for the fences, and earns the right to be taken seriously, no matter how fantastical it might get. It never devolves into unintended laughter.

Summer 2026 has introduced itself loud and proud with it. It’s a perfect Spielberg summer popcorn blockbuster. People will eat it up, as they should. I can see it as a staple of conversations amongst friends, family and colleagues – whether it be at the proverbial office water cooler, in post-show discussions at Chili’s or Applebee’s, or at the neighborhood block party while burgers are flipped, sparklers are lit, and cicadas serenade us. The PG-13 rating makes it an ideal night out for any family with children who have the attention span to handle its 2 hours and 25 minutes. It didn’t feel that long.

It opens with a man being chased by a team from an extraterrestrial coverup organization. He is Daniel Kellner, and he used to work for this company, known as Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth). It’s a loose acronym for “waived reporting, development, and extraction.” It’s one of a couple of great fictional titles assigned to companies – the other being a TV station in Kansas City, known as KCXE. It’s called that so a character can jokingly refer to it as “‘kay, sexy.”

Daniel knows too much, and has something that belongs to Wardex. They have kidnapped Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), in exchange for it. It’s a small rod that when you squeeze it, you can virtually teleport and “be” in a room with someone else. There’s a neat effect where Firth and Hewson swap eye colors as Noah “visits” Jane in a secluded farmhouse. Colman Domingo plays Hugo, a former Wardex employee who has also defected. He and Daniel have been communicating, waiting for the perfect time to bring full disclosure to the world about what Wardex has been keeping under wraps for decades. They have numerous flash drives of video evidence going back a long way – some of which is from Roswell, New Mexico.

The possible key to helping them get this on the air lies in KCXE meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt). She finds out, in one eventful morning, that she has unusual otherworldly powers. Even before she breaks into an alien voice on live TV while doing the weather (in a moment that inevitably goes viral), she’s able to speak languages she wasn’t aware she knew, and knows the police officer who pulls her over on the way to the studio had a fight with his wife that morning. She can make eye contact with someone and know everything about them. There’s a funny bit where she looks at her boyfriend Jackson and just says “you’ve gotta be kidding me.” Wyatt Russell (Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son) isn’t in the movie a gigantic amount, but he provides fun comic relief as Jackson.

The usual Spielbergian moments of comedy arise, usually at the absurdity of the death-defying action situations in which the characters find themselves. There are some exciting ones. Being on the hood of a car that’s dragged by a train, while you’re trying to jump onto the ladder of that moving train while being shot at: just a typical day in the life of the average person, right? We can feel the breathlessness of screenwriter David Koepp’s mind bursting at the seams with ideas. One of the more interesting ones is when Jane, who used to be a novitiate, asks her former Mother Superior if she believes that there could be more life we don’t know about. Her response is that it’s very possible. Why would God create such a vast universe and have it be just us?

Spielberg forced his longtime collaborator John Williams out of retirement to do the score. After Williams suggested a handful of composers, Spielberg told his old friend “you’re my guy – there’s nobody else.” Williams has always had a knack for setting the tone for any given upcoming scene. Fantasy sequences have him playing around with raised fourths in the major scale, while a second-act showdown begins with a “this is the moment – here it comes” theme that will get you pumped up.

Josh O’Connor is up to the task of leading man in a Spielberg sci-fi epic. Eve Hewson, who previously worked with Spielberg on Bridge of Spies, reminds me of Rachel Weisz from 25 years ago, and makes an effective Jane. Colin Firth is appropriately slimy as a relentless Inspector Javert type. Colman Domingo seems to be the new Morgan Freeman – there to explain everything. I never get tired of listening to him, no matter how clichéd his lines might get. However, this is Emily Blunt’s show, in my favorite performance of a career that has had stellar ones.

Before seeing it, I’d heard that it ramps up to a powerful emotional wallop in the final act. It does, but not in any way I would have foreseen. I don’t want to talk about it too much, but there’s a small bit part performance involved. It’s one of the best such performances I will ever see. There’s an arc and a process of discovery within this person’s limited screen time, and it’s played just right. You’ll know exactly who I mean when you see it. Disclosure Day does its job as a movie, as entertainment, and as a conversation piece that will bring people together over the summer. If my brain wasn’t satisfied, my heart always was.

Grade: A