Amazon Customer-Loved Finds for Summer, From $8
Georgie Gassaro
Editorial Intern
Steven Spielberg is back with his first film in three years, and critics are saying “Disclosure Day” is a return to form — for better or for worse.
“Disclosure Day” tells the story of a large-scale government alien conspiracy, with motifs he once explored in movies like “ET,” “Close Encounters of Third Kind” and “War of the Worlds.”
The film stars Emily Blunt, Eve Hweson, Colman Domingo, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth, among others (including one of TODAY’s own). Spielberg worked with longtime collaborator David Koepp on the script.
This marks Spielberg’s first movie since the autobiographical movie “The Fabelmans,” out in late 2022.
Critics, in their reviews, are noticing how the film builds on his fascination with extraterrestrial life, while tying in current events. While some reviews are quite positive, others are disappointed with Spielberg’s ultimate wrap-up of his big ideas.
Below, here’s what some major outlets are concluding about “Disclosure Day” so far.
In his review for Variety, chief film critic Owen Gleiberman calls the movie a “lavishly intense chase thriller with a dollop of deep-think rumination.”
In its exploration of the idea of the government covering up the existence of aliens, it’s “nice to see a mainstream thriller aim high,” he wrote.
He also praised the movie’s performances, especially by Blunt, “who makes you feel she’s seeing the uncanny.”
However, the effect is a “thriller docudrama that’s too cut-and-dried about what it believes.”
“For all the film’s slow build it doesn’t take us anywhere overly surprising,” he said.
Justin Chang from The New Yorker said the movie left him “dispiritingly dry-eyed.”
The script “exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond” to proof of alien life, and according to Chang, “Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift.”
His conclusion? “Though ‘Disclosure Day’ teems with intelligent life, it also blurs the line — not the one separating us from them but the one between phoning home and phoning it in.”
The resemblance between Spielberg’s past hits and this new film was a more positive quality for Lindsey Bahr from The Associated Press.
“He’s on fire, making a movie that feels like the kinds he used to churn out regularly in the first half of his career,” Bahr said.
“Many of the greatest pleasures of ‘Disclosure Day’ are wrapped up in our own Spielberg literacy. The movie language is unmistakably his, with shadows and lens flare and smoke, blown out lights and wet streets and all. His set-pieces are old fashioned, tactile and delightfully sane, from car chases to a thrilling sequence involving a train — apparently a dream of his since he made ‘Duel.’ And the John Williams score, a very undeniably John Williams score, is the kind that may produce goose bumps.”
David Rooney called “Disclosure Day” Spielberg’s “return to what he does best.”
Rooney, who believes “no living director better understands the magic of movies,” said his latest is “first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.”
He also commented on where the movie fits into Spielberg’s largeer body of work.
“But as is fitting for a filmmaker pushing 80, awestruck innocence now co-exists with a more ruminative maturity, especially when touching on the secrecy, manipulation and deception of governmental power.”
Even as otherworldly as it is, The New York Times said Spielberg “brings the rest of us home” with “Disclosure Day.”
Manohla Dargis, chief film critic for The New York Times, says “there’s a lot going on” in the movie, but “its maximalism is coherent and strategic.”
“The movie veers between comedy and suspense, action and contemplation, the sounds of squealing tires mixing with sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good and higher powers.”
Focus Features is owned by NBCUniversal, TODAY’s parent company.
Georgie Gassaro is an editorial intern for TODAY.com and an Ithaca College journalism student.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLCApple®, Apple logo® and App Store® are registered trademarks of Apple Inc.
Leave a Reply