15 June 2026 – I went with two other members of Cinema Club to the ‘Showcase’ cinema to see ‘Disclosure Day’ today. The synopsis on the cinema website was as follows:
“If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you?”
This film was a sci-fi film about the presence of aliens on the earth, who have been there for many years, but which has been covered-up by the American government, and throughout this film they are continuing to try to prevent that fact being disclosed.
The leading members of the cast were: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo and Eve Hewson; and the film was directed by Steven Spielberg, who also produced and co-wrote the screenplay. He is also known for directing ‘Jaws’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’, ‘Poltergeist’, ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestial’ and ‘The Colour Purple’. He was additionally producer on many other well-known films.
The plot, setting and acting was good, but not great. I was very surprised at how just good (rather than great, especially as John Williams was also the composer of the music) this film was, although I did like it better than my two companions who found it to be ‘so-so’, but I would still recommend it to everyone, particularly because the story was good, even if it was a bit clunky in places.
Mark Kermode mentioned that there were 42 drafts of the screenplay before saying anything else. He describes the film concisely as a film about empathy being a strength, and he refers to the tension, chases and standoffs, and concludes that the performances were terrific and the movie, for him, was a good romping adventure movie.
That being said, he also referred to lots of repetition from ‘Close Encounters of The Third Kind’. And he found that the action in the third act of the movie made no sense, requiring a huge suspension of disbelief to engage with it at all. He considered the final explanations to be very old-fashioned and not very satisfying. He does, nonetheless, describe the film as enjoyable and fine, but could have been a lot better with more heartbreak.
He considered the digital animals to be very poor, but he really liked the idea of the values where empathy is seen as a superpower, especially given the state of things currently in the USA, where Elon Musk, in particular, considers empathy to be a weakness.
I gave it a score of 7, whilst IMDB gave it 6.5, and the Rotten Tomatoes score was 7.9 (79%).
Fraser