There is a specific kind of pleasure that comes from watching a master work. Not the thrill of surprise, not the breathless excitement of discovering something new, but the deep, almost involuntary comfort of watching someone who simply knows what they’re doing better than almost anyone alive.

Disclosure Day is not Steven Spielberg’s best film and wouldn’t even crack his top ten. But sitting in the dark watching him do what he does, you feel the weight of that half-century of craft in every frame, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Spielberg returning to alien territory could have been comfort food with familiar wonder and awe. Disclosure Day is darker than that: A cybersecurity whistleblower and a meteorologist find themselves at the centre of a global conspiracy, and the film’s central question isn’t what’s out there, but whether humanity deserves to know. It’s a question Spielberg has been circling since Close Encounters and E.T., and he still hasn’t tired of asking it. The difference here is the urgency, and this time it feels less like wonder and more like a reckoning.

When the film works, it works well enough to keep you enthralled. However, longtime Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography is a mixed bag; his lens flares, a signature that once felt electric, have curdled into habit, and there are moments where the visual style draws attention to itself when it should be invisible. But when Spielberg lets the action breathe, the film comes alive in a way that feels genuinely thrilling. Like car chases with real stakes, sequences here build and release with the kind of pulse-pounding precision that defined his best work in the 90s. That Spielberg is still very much in there.

Blunt carries the film on instinct alone, and you believe everything she does, even when the screenplay doesn’t quite earn it. Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth are well cast and underused, which in a lesser film would feel like waste. Here, it just feels like a missed opportunity. You sense what each of them could have done with more room. You wish they’d had it. Some of that falls on David Koepp’s screenplay; the man behind Jurassic Park, War Of The Worlds and Spider-Man knows how to build a world and move people through it, but too often here the dialogue lands where it should soar, and pivotal scenes settle for functionality when they deserve something more.

There is a specific kind of pleasure that comes from watching a master work. Not the thrill of surprise, not the breathless excitement of discovering something new, but the deep, almost involuntary comfort of watching someone who simply knows what they’re doing better than almost anyone alive.

Disclosure Day is not Steven Spielberg’s best film and wouldn’t even crack his top ten. But sitting in the dark watching him do what he does, you feel the weight of that half-century of craft in every frame, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Spielberg returning to alien territory could have been comfort food with familiar wonder and awe. Disclosure Day is darker than that: A cybersecurity whistleblower and a meteorologist find themselves at the centre of a global conspiracy, and the film’s central question isn’t what’s out there, but whether humanity deserves to know. It’s a question Spielberg has been circling since Close Encounters and E.T., and he still hasn’t tired of asking it. The difference here is the urgency, and this time it feels less like wonder and more like a reckoning.

When the film works, it works well enough to keep you enthralled. However, longtime Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kamiński’s cinematography is a mixed bag; his lens flares, a signature that once felt electric, have curdled into habit, and there are moments where the visual style draws attention to itself when it should be invisible. But when Spielberg lets the action breathe, the film comes alive in a way that feels genuinely thrilling. Like car chases with real stakes, sequences here build and release with the kind of pulse-pounding precision that defined his best work in the 90s. That Spielberg is still very much in there.

Blunt carries the film on instinct alone, and you believe everything she does, even when the screenplay doesn’t quite earn it. Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth are well cast and underused, which in a lesser film would feel like waste. Here, it just feels like a missed opportunity. You sense what each of them could have done with more room. You wish they’d had it. Some of that falls on David Koepp’s screenplay; the man behind Jurassic Park, War Of The Worlds and Spider-Man knows how to build a world and move people through it, but too often here the dialogue lands where it should soar, and pivotal scenes settle for functionality when they deserve something more.