THE FILM
Disclosure Day. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by David Koepp, story by Spielberg. With Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell. Cinematography by Janusz Kamiński, music by John Williams. Universal / Amblin. 145 min, PG-13. In cinemas 12 June 2026.
Spoiler warning: this review discusses the film’s ending and a central twist.
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day arrives 49 years after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the lazy read is that he has come back to the same well with less to draw. I land the other way. This is the most ufology-literate film Spielberg has ever made, and that is exactly why it works. The thing people keep calling generic is the whole point.
The setup, briefly. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity contractor who steals his employer’s complete archive of alien encounter footage, material going back to Roswell in 1947, and decides the world deserves the truth. Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist who freezes on air and starts speaking in clicks nobody can parse, nobody except Danny. They have never met, yet they are bound by a childhood neither fully remembers.
Now the part that matters. The cover-up does not run through the Pentagon or some square-jawed general. It runs through Wardex, a private corporation that has overseen the U.S. alien program since 1973, structured so the money stays untraceable and even the President is cut out of the loop. If that sounds familiar, it should. It mirrors David Grusch’s July 2023 Congressional testimony almost beat for beat: a multi-decade crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program, parked inside defense contractors, walled off from oversight. Spielberg is not inventing the paranoia here. He is dramatising the specific shape that real disclosure advocates have described. Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon is the company man who believes secrecy is mercy, and the film lets him make his case.
The experiencers are the second reason this lands. In 1977 Spielberg gave us contact and wonder, but he tiptoed around the messier human side: abduction, telepathy, the people whose lives get rewritten by a single encounter. Disclosure Day walks straight into it. Margaret and Danny were both taken as children by the same beings and left with latent gifts, hers an empathy so total it reads as mind-reading, his an innate grasp of language and mathematics that makes him the only translator on Earth. They are experiencers, and the film treats their testimony as the load-bearing center of the story, not a sideshow. That is the canon Spielberg circled in 1977 and finally commits to now.
The beings themselves close the loop. Spielberg has said the aliens were built from what real people claim to have seen, and the clearest fingerprint is the 1994 Ariel School encounter in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, where dozens of schoolchildren described small beings with huge wraparound eyes and reported a telepathic, almost environmental message. That is the case Harvard psychiatrist John Mack actually flew out to investigate. So when Margaret’s abilities arrive as telepathic contact rooted in a childhood event, the film is quoting the modern record, not little green men. This is current ufology on screen.
On craft, Janusz Kamiński and John Williams are doing career-level work. Kamiński’s shadows, lens flares, wet streets and blown-out light are unmistakable, and the train sequence is the kind of tactile set piece Spielberg has wanted to shoot since Duel. Williams, on his 30th film with Spielberg, delivers a score the AP rightly said produces goosebumps. At 145 minutes the movie moves like a thriller while it argues like a sermon, and mostly gets away with both.
I will grant the fair knocks, because they are fair. A couple of blockbuster beats creak, especially a piece of alien hardware that lets Scanlon teleport into people’s heads, which tips the grounded tone towards comic book. And the ending splits people. It is too sentimental for some and too abrupt for others. Margaret returns to the anchor desk to deliver the message from the stars, says “Listen,” and Spielberg cuts to black before we hear a word of it. I understand both complaints. But whichever camp you are in, that is a last-twenty-minutes problem, not a film problem.
This is where I part company with the strongest line against the movie. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman calls it an invigorating chase thriller that never becomes a close encounter with wonder, and argues that where Spielberg once led the culture, he now follows the lore his own films inspired. The New Yorker’s Justin Chang put it more cruelly, writing that the film “blurs the line … between phoning home and phoning it in.” I think they have the yardstick backwards. In 1977 Spielberg invented the iconography because there was nothing yet to be faithful to. In 2026, after the 2023 hearings, the age of disclosure, and a government UAP file release in the weeks before the premiere, the culture has caught up to him. Fidelity to the actual testimony is the achievement now, not a failure of nerve. He is not chasing wonder for its own sake. He is taking the subject seriously, maybe for the first time.
The reception shows how live this argument is. The film sits at 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 75 percent audience score. The Hollywood Reporter called it a return to what Spielberg does best. The AP said he is on fire. The New York Times said that even at its most otherworldly it brings the rest of us home. The Washington Post framed it as a beautiful plea to all of us. The skeptics are loud, but they are outnumbered.
So here is where I land. “Pretty good” undersells it. Where it counts, accuracy to the real testimony, the experiencer angle finally brought in from the cold, and two of Spielberg’s longest collaborators working at the top of their craft, Disclosure Day delivers. It is the most serious mainstream UFO film since 1977, warts and all.
References and further reading
- Disclosure Day, dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal / Amblin, 2026
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. Steven Spielberg, Columbia Pictures, 1977
- David Grusch, testimony to the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, 26 July 2023
- The Ariel School encounter, Ruwa, Zimbabwe, 16 September 1994; investigated by Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack
- Owen Gleiberman, review, Variety
- Justin Chang, review, The New Yorker
- Reviews and scores cited: The Hollywood Reporter, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rotten Tomatoes