Film review

  • Disclosure Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Spielberg (2026)

    Since 2020, Steven Spielberg has tried his hand at a musical remake (West Side Story) then semi-autobiography, which verged on self-hagiography (The Fabelmans).  His latest picture has been widely welcomed as a return to his movie-making roots:  it’s an action thriller crossed with sci-fi (extraterrestrials department).  This thirty-seventh feature echoes plenty of predecessors in the Spielberg filmography, giving Disclosure Day a persistent greatest-hits feel that’s reinforced by John Williams’ score.  At the end of this year, Spielberg will be eighty years old.  His films have given huge pleasure and excitement to millions.  You wouldn’t expect him, at this stage of a long and vastly successful career, to discover new depths or forge new paths in cinema.  Why shouldn’t he now enjoy himself, sticking to tried-and-tested formulas?  Perhaps Spielberg did just that on Disclosure Day, yet it’s a pain to sit through.

    With humankind on the verge of World War III, cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) steals from the Wardex Corporation, a secret outfit attached to the US government, a small piece of kit and a lot of classified computer files.  These files, which Daniel means to make public, comprise evidence of human-alien interactions over a period of many decades, from the 1947 Roswell incident onwards.  The head of Wardex, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), leads the hunt for Daniel, who goes into hiding with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson).  Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) does weather reports on a Kansas City TV news channel, where she hopes to graduate to news anchor.  One morning, a cardinal bird enters and exits her kitchen; after this flying visit, Margaret can speak fluently in foreign languages she didn’t know she knew, including Russian and Korean (both significant vis-à-vis the looming global conflict).  By looking into someone’s eyes, Margaret can also intuit that person’s deepest feelings and emotional attachments.  Over the course of Disclosure Day, this ability will get her out of several tricky encounters – starting with a traffic cop, who stops her for speeding as she drives, running late, to the news station.  Live on air, Margaret begins to speak what sounds like gibberish, before fainting.  The broadcast goes viral and Scanlon is among its viewers.  He knows the gibberish is really an alien language, and that he must get his hands on Margaret urgently.  In the company of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), she too goes on the run.

    You soon guess where the film is heading:  Daniel will eventually bring the secret files to the attention of the world, via the Kansas City TV channel, with Margaret delivering this headline news.  During the two-hours-plus journey to the big finish, which gives Spielberg his title (‘This is disclosure day,’ Margaret announces from the newsdesk), plenty happens.  Daniel and Jane are captured.  Margaret experiences visions of Daniel, tracks him down and then is herself captured.  She, Daniel and Jane are rescued by Wardex employees-turned-whistleblowers, led by Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo).  He shelters them in a warehouse that contains a reconstruction of Margaret’s childhood home.  Encouraged by Hugo to unearth suppressed memories of her early years, Margaret remembers that she was abducted by aliens, who also gave her special powers.  The same happened to Daniel, hence his mathematical genius – or, in the words of Hugo, ‘fluency in the language in which the book of the universe is written’.  That cardinal in Margaret’s kitchen is the first of a series of CGI creatures in evidence in Disclosure Day – there are foxes, deer, a raccoon to come.  All these, it transpires, are extraterrestrials, assuming animal form as a means of keeping an eye on Margaret and Daniel.  Over the decades, aliens not in disguise have been captured and subjected to vivisection by Wardex, which has also been reverse-engineering their technology, including the device that Daniel stole.

    The story is Spielberg’s idea.  To make a screenplay of it, he turned to David Koepp, who also wrote or co-wrote for Spielberg Jurassic Park (1993) and its first sequel (1997), War of the Worlds (2005) and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).  More recently, Koepp did the fancy script for last year’s Black Bag, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and the latest Jurassic Park spin-off, with Gareth Edwards at the helm.  I don’t pretend to be good at understanding the kind of convoluted plot on offer in Disclosure Day, but I did become increasingly suspicious of Spielberg/Koepp’s selective approach to key parts of it – including the stolen kit.  This hand-held, pocket-sized device, containing huge supplies of extraterrestrial psychic and physical energy, enables – inter alia – access to and control of the minds of others:  Scanlon also has one of the gadgets, which he first uses it to get inside Jane’s head and discover where she and Daniel are located.  Daniel, despite his regularly desperate circumstances, doesn’t use his device – but Jane hands it to Margaret just when it’s needed at the climax to the film.  When Wardex operatives, to prevent the crucial broadcast going ahead, disable the power grid and the Kansas City news channel’s back-up generator, Margaret uses the device to reboot the power supply.

    There are more fundamental objections to the conclusive disclosure.  This story is taking place ostensibly in the present day:  why doesn’t Daniel simply put the stolen files online?  Because his mentor/protector Hugo takes the view that a legitimate news broadcast is preferable to an internet leak of the material.  Spielberg presumably shares that view, but to assume, as the finale does, that the world would be instantly compelled to believe what they’re seeing and hearing on their TV and computer screens is question-begging on a cosmic scale.  In a montage of international reactions to what’s emerging from Kansas City, someone is heard asking how they can be sure it isn’t all deepfake.  Too right – but Spielberg seems to think he’s dealing with the issue just by including that line in the script.  When those well-known Roswell images appear on the screen (ahead of the film’s own mock-up footage of subsequent alien visitors, etc), plenty of viewers would surely be thinking this is old hat.  And it seems both comically improbable and morally irresponsible to suggest that airing the top-secret material would dislodge the imminent outbreak of a world war from top spot in the news.  Far more likely that people would see the whole thing as news-hacking by the prospective enemy, a ruse to distract the attention of America and her allies.

    What’s most tiresome about Disclosure Day is that it’s always hyper.  The action sequences are hyperactive, the feeling bits hyper-sentimental, and so on.  When Margaret recovers her childhood memories, she’s a little girl (Delaney Cuthbert) in a snowy forest, flanked by the deer, the fox et al:  it’s an animated Christmas card.  For a film premised on an important – or self-important – message to humanity (see below), there are an awful lot of chase sequences, on roads and rail tracks.  An awful lot of talk, too, including religiose guff.  Jane was raised Catholic, became a novitiate, left the order but retains her essential faith.  Early in the story, she takes refuge in the nunnery that was once her home.  She subsequently asks the head nun, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), if she believes there could be extraterrestrial life and how its existence would affect Christian belief.  Sister Maura’s reply is along the lines of, why would God create the vast universe and leave it empty of sentient beings except in our world?   This is presented as a profound, original insight.  It amazes the supposedly thoughtful Jane, although it’s something that must have occurred to millions in modern times.

    Emily Blunt is hyper, too.  In the film’s overall scheme, a sequence where Margaret desperately tries to destroy her mobile phone, to avoid being tracked down by Wardex, should be rather minor, but it sums up what’s grating about Blunt’s work in Disclosure Day – and about Spielberg’s direction generally.  In a car park, Margaret throws her mobile out of the car window then instructs Jackson to drive over the phone.  He misses and Margaret yells at him to try again.  Then she furiously stamps on the mobile.  And so on.  In the hi-tech context of the story so far, this bit of human ineptitude could make for a charming contrast, but Spielberg and his lead make even moments like this spectacularly overemphatic.  Sustaining the energy level that Emily Blunt does sustain is a feat of showmanship and stamina – her whirlwind performance is proof of Blunt’s acting chops, but Margaret never becomes a character.  The same goes, in a less frenetic mode, for Josh O’Connor’s Daniel.  Blunt and O’Connor both do American accents; giving the chief villain a clipped English accent harks back to Hollywood casting in the days of Basil Rathbone, although Colin Firth comes over as sneery rather than malign.  In the later stages, it’s revealed that Noah Scanlon’s beloved wife died and his misanthropy is the twisted expression of a private grief.  With Firth in the role, you don’t believe that either.

    Colman Domingo’s nicer-than-nice Hugo Wakefield firmly believes that aliens – so much more developed, scientifically and morally, than bellicose humans – want to persuade us that empathy is the key to saving the world and ourselves.  On a one-to-one level, Margaret Fairchild’s empathetic intuition is presumably evidence of this.  She’s mostly a motor mouth, though, succinct only when she has something important to say.  That gibberish interruption to Margaret’s weather forecast translates as ‘Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know’.  In the final scene, one of the extraterrestrials captured by Wardex but now freed by Hugo and his team, whispers a message to Daniel, who relays it to Margaret (pass it on!) as she broadcasts to the world.  Spielberg gives his heroine the last word, and it is just a single word – ‘Listen’.  It’s a relief that Disclosure Day has no more to say.  After 145 minutes, we’ve seen and heard enough.

    25 June 2026

     

     

     

  • A Dry White Season

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Euzhan Palcy (1989)

    Throughout the opening titles, two adolescent boys play ball or good-naturedly wrestle on the lush lawns of a large suburban house.  One boy is white, the other Black, the sun is shining, the boys are happy.  We can guess their smiles will soon disappear – especially if we know that A Dry White Season is set in South Africa during the apartheid era.  The Black boy is Jonathan Ngubene (Bekhithemba Mpofu); his white playmate is Johan du Toit (Rowen Elmes).  The well-kept lawns of this Johannesburg home are the work of Jonathan’s father Gordon (Winston Ntshona), the gardener employed by Johan’s parents, Ben (Donald Sutherland) and Susan (Janet Suzman).  When they’re not together, the two boys play different ball games.  Johan’s parents are on the touchline, cheering on their son in his (all-white, of course) school rugby team.  Jonathan and his Black mates kick a soccer ball round the dusty streets of the Soweto township.

    Plenty happens within the first half hour or so of Euzhan Palcy’s drama, based on André Brink’s novel of the same name.  South African police open fire on the Black schoolchildren protesting in Soweto at being forced to learn in Afrikaans.  (Approaching 200 children are thought to have died in the massacre of 16 June 1976.)  Jonathan is arrested and vanishes without trace.  Gordon, desperate to find his son, is also arrested, tortured and murdered by a police team led by Captain Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow).  Ben du Toit, who teaches history in the same school where his son’s a pupil, trusts the police implicitly and so declines to help Gordon in his search for Jonathan.  When Gordon disappears, Ben starts to think again and to see the light of what’s going on in his country – a process of enlightenment that occupies the remainder of the film.  His efforts to secure justice for Gordon cost Ben du Toit his job, his marriage and eventually his life.

    The subject of the film, when it was made and by whom, combine to guarantee A Dry White Season a great deal of audience goodwill.  It was released in autumn 1989, a few weeks after F W de Klerk became South African president, a few months before Nelson Mandela was released from prison on Robben Island.  In making this picture, Euzhan Palcy, a thirty-year-old Martinican, became the first Black woman to direct a feature produced by a major Hollywood studio (MGM).  You also admire Afrikaner André Brink’s courage in writing the source material when he did:  Brink’s novel was first published (though initially banned in South Africa) only three years after Soweto[1].  Yet this isn’t enough to blind you – at least at this distance in time – to the film’s huge dramatic defects, its clumsy plotting and moralising.

    This was the sophomore feature from Euzhan Palcy, who made her debut with Sugar Cane Alley in 1983 (and has made only one subsequent feature, a 1992 musical called Siméon).  Palcy also shares the screenplay credit for A Dry White Season, with Colin Welland.  It’s sometimes hard to tell whether script or direction is the bigger problem; in either case, things go from bad to worse.  The du Toits’ family celebrations round the Christmas tree are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of taxi driver Stanley Mokhaya (Zakes Mokae), a Black activist with whom Ben has been working closely.  Stanley’s a bit drunk; insults are exchanged between him and Susan’s father (David de Keyser).  Stanley has come to the house to break the news to Ben that Emily (Thoko Ntshinga), the broken-hearted widow of Gordon and mother of Jonathan, is now dead, too.  The ruckus is enough not only for Ben’s scandalised in-laws to leave but also for Susan du Toit to pack a suitcase and walk out on her husband, there and then.  She takes their virulently racist daughter Suzette (Susannah Harker) with her although loyal Johan insists on staying with his father.  At this point in the narrative, the abominable scene seems an aberration.  By the end of the story, a succession of melodramatic sequences – Johan delivers his father’s secret documents to crusading journalist Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon) to publish, Stolz’s car runs Ben over, Stanley shoots Stolz dead in revenge – means the Christmas episode no longer stands out as badly conceived and staged.

    The characters are mostly so thinly written that there’s not much the actors can do.  In the case of Janet Suzman’s Susan, this is frustrating.  In the case of, for example, Richard Wilson, who plays the headmaster at the school where Ben teaches, it’s a relief he’s not on screen more:  in his first scene, Wilson doesn’t even try to cloak his Victor Meldrew voice in a South African accent; in his next scene, he does.  It wouldn’t be fair to say that Jürgen Prochnow gives a bad performance, yet slack editing makes it look as though he does:  Stolz’s gimlet-eyed glares always go on a beat too long.  The main problem, though, is Donald Sutherland.  In Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Sutherland was cast against physical and temperamental type as a brutal Blackshirt.  His portrait, such as it was, amounted to crude censure of the character’s politics.  In the lead in A Dry White Season, Sutherland is worse.  If Ben were bluff and hearty at the start his radicalisation might have impact.  Donald Sutherland exudes liberal conscience – so much so that you never believe Ben du Toit would have lived comfortably with apartheid until its atrocities struck close to home.

    Despite all this, A Dry White Season is worth seeing (I’d always meant to see it but never had until now) – and for what the film is best remembered for.  It features what by general consent is Marlon Brando’s last great performance (though he appeared in several more films before his death in 2004).  As Ian McKenzie, a high-profile progressive lawyer whom Ben persuades to represent the Ngubene family at the inquest into Gordon’s death, Brando has only two scenes and can’t be on screen for more than ten minutes all told.  The first scene is a private meeting between Ben and McKenzie; the second is the court inquest.  It’s true that, thanks to André Brink or the screenwriters or both, Brando has the script’s juiciest lines but to say he makes the most of them is an understatement.  In both scenes, he does a brilliant job of grounding McKenzie’s witty sarcasm in deeply bitter yet controlled hatred of the legal system of which he’s part.  When Ben naively says he wants justice for Gordon, McKenzie replies that the ‘distant cousins’ justice and law are, in South Africa, ‘not on speaking terms at all’.  When Ben mentions the ‘many cases in support of human rights’ that McKenzie has won, the latter regretfully disagrees because ‘Every time I win a case, they simply change the law’.  At the inquest the presiding magistrate (Michael Gambon) is as blatantly parti pris as McKenzie’s legal opponent (Ronald Pickup) and lying-through-his-teeth Captain Stolz in the witness box.  As a result, it’s not easy to believe Ian McKenzie managed to win cases even before the law was changed to ensure no repeat.  But for every moment he’s in the film, Marlon Brando doesn’t just transcend A Dry White Season.  He transforms it.

    22 June 2026

    [1] The book takes its title from a ‘struggle poem’ by Mongane Wally Serote, lines from which Brink uses as an epigraph:  ‘it is a dry white season/dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out/and with a broken heart they dive down gently to the earth/not even bleeding …’

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