Disclosure Day (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Josh O’Conner as Daniel Kellner and Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild

Disclosure Day

★★★★☆

Spielberg at 80, still making audiences believe, still making eyes go moist, still doing wonder better than anyone alive.

The level of excitement and anticipation in the weeks, days, hours and finally minutes before the release of this film was probably enough on its own to make the whole experience worthwhile.

Waiting to watch Disclosure Day made me feel like a child again, waiting for Santa to arrive at Christmas.

After all, that’s half the magic of Christmas, isn’t it? The anticipation. The waiting. The ritual of finally unwrapping the present. Often, it hardly mattered what was inside the box anyway.

Not that Disclosure Day was disappointing after all this wait… Quite the opposite.

I’ve literally just come out of the cinema, after watching the film for the first time. Usually, when I write a review, particularly if it’s by a director like Spielberg, I would probably wait a little to let it sink in and digest it properly. But this time I’m going to write down my gut reactions… and work it out as I write…

Please indulge my streams of consciousness. Maybe one day I’ll go back and revise it all.

Before I say anything else, I should probably declare my bias. If you’ve been following my reviews for the past five years, or if you have ever attended any of my film clubs at The Chiswick Cinema, you’ll know exactly how I feel about Steven Spielberg.

He is one of the main reasons I am the person I am today.

I genuinely don’t think I would be sitting here writing this review (or even working in film at all), if it hadn’t been for Steven Spielberg.

It was Raiders of the Lost Ark back in 1981 that first planted those seeds in my mind that perhaps one day I might tell stories in pictures for a living.

So yes, I arrived at this film carrying a fair amount of emotional baggage and some very high expectations, fuelled further by the mostly positive early reactions from critics all over the world. After all, a new film by Steven Spielberg, whether you like him or not, is an event.

The director has recently, and repeatedly, stated that Disclosure Day is not a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Well, officially, perhaps it isn’t. The story stands perfectly well on its own. But emotionally, spiritually and structurally? Come on. This is about as close as we’re ever likely to get to learning what happens after the mothership left Earth at the end of that film in 1977.

Once again, we have ordinary people experiencing extraordinary events. Once again, there is an irresistible pull towards something they don’t quite understand. Once again, there is a government conspiracy to cover up alien life. And once again, the film slowly builds towards a moment of revelation and wonder.

(I think I’ve even spotted a picture of Devil’s Tower at some point towards the end.)

I don’t want to give away spoilers, especially because the marketing department seems to have done that already in spades. Disgracefully, the trailer gives away far too much, including images from the last few minutes. It’s one of those occasions where I found myself wishing I had gone in completely blind.

So I’m going to tread carefully through the plot. But given the title, you can easily guess where everything is heading.

The film wastes no time on set-ups. In fact, it starts so abruptly that at our screening, the projectionist briefly stopped the film because people genuinely thought the first reel had been missed. We are thrown directly into the middle of a story, a chase, and from there the film hardly ever stops to explain how things got to that point.

You’ll just need to catch up yourself (which you will, don’t worry, this is still a blockbuster popcorn film, not Thomas Pynchon).

On the acting side, Josh O’Connor is superb, grounding some of the more fantastical elements with complete sincerity, while Emily Blunt delivers perhaps the film’s most emotionally complex performance.

Colman Domingo adds a welcome presence, giving a more relaxed energy that plays nicely against the frantic chase.

Colin Firth as Noah Scanlon

While Colin Firth, as ever, brings a quiet authority and a touch of dignity to what could otherwise have been a stock villain.

Watching the film, I was constantly reminded of different phases of Spielberg’s career, particularly in the realm of sci-fi. There are echoes of E.T., traces of Minority Report and even hints of Ready Player One.

At times, it almost feels like Spielberg’s greatest hits album (a description that might sound dismissive, but I mean it as a compliment). The sense of wonder, the emotional sincerity, the fascination with ordinary people confronted by the extraordinary, the love for what lies above the stars… all the stuff I’ve grown up with, and exactly what I expect from the Master. It’s all here.

Technically, the film is astonishing, but that goes without saying.

Only a film nerd would probably notice this (guilty as charged), but the way Spielberg stages and films the car sequences is extraordinary. The camera glides in and out of vehicles, circles characters, shifts perspectives and constantly creates movement without ever drawing attention to itself.

It’s filmmaking of such confidence and mastery that you almost don’t notice how difficult it must have been to achieve.

The lighting is equally beautiful. Lens flares, shadows, flashing lights and glowing silhouettes dominate the visual palette, creating a look that feels strangely old-fashioned in the best possible sense, in a world that feels ultra-modern, with mobile phones, digital screens everywhere and even the use of AI being mentioned.

It often feels like a Spielberg film from the late seventies or early eighties that somehow got lost and only surfaced today.

The CGI work is surprisingly not on the same level as the rest of the visuals, but luckily there isn’t a lot of it. I found that surprising for a film of this calibre.

All of that is underlined, underscored and, as always, enhanced by the most John Williams score you can imagine, mostly restrained (there are many moments of silence too, something of a rarity for a Hollywood blockbuster), but carrying emotion and that magical, dreamlike sense of tension and wonder on its sleeve, in exactly the way John Williams has been doing for 30 of Spielberg’s past films.

If you stay for the credits, by the end of them, you will be able to hum the tune of the film by heart.

And then there is the ending, or rather the last act.

Without giving anything away, Spielberg does what he has always done better than any other director alive today.

He doesn’t just show us spectacle; he shows us people experiencing spectacle. Wonder reflected in human faces. Awe. Fear. Hope. Tears. Nobody does it better.

After eleven seasons of The X-Files, countless alien invasion films and decades of science fiction stories (some of the best ones from Spielberg himself), it shouldn’t be possible to make audiences feel genuine wonder about this subject anymore.

And yet somehow he does.

During those final twenty minutes, it’s impossible not to feel completely gripped, on the edge of your seat. Not because of action or suspense in the conventional sense, but because Spielberg had once again managed to convince me to believe.

To hope. To want it all to be true. My eyes were moist… and I’m sure I wasn’t alone.

Do I think this belongs alongside Raiders, Jaws, E.T. or Schindler’s List? Not quite. Those remain untouchable masterpieces.

But this is still a powerful, moving and deeply personal piece of filmmaking from a director who, at 80, still has that sense of child-like wonder and love for the stories he tells. He also understands something that many modern blockbusters have forgotten: audiences don’t just want spectacle.

They want to dream with their eyes open (Spielberg famously once said ‘I dream for a living’). They want to feel something larger than themselves.

And nobody captures that feeling quite like Steven Spielberg.

May he carry on making movie magic for many more years. Possibly starting with The Day After Disclosure Day?

Disclosure Day is out in cinemas now.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.