Disclosure Day Review: Spielberg's Chase Machine Runs Out of Questions

Yes, Disclosure Day is worth watching, and it is worth watching for Emily Blunt. Steven Spielberg's first feature since The Fabelmans (2022) is a 146-minute chase thriller that runs at full speed for most of its length and then loses interest in the question it has been asking since the first frame. Blunt's Kansas City meteorologist is the best thing in it, and the script is the problem. Critics noticed. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 79 percent from 443 critic reviews and Metacritic at 74 from 63, both checked on October 22, 2026.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it. A 146-minute, PG-13 science fiction thriller carrying Emily Blunt, shot by Janusz Kaminski, scored by John Williams, and held together by a chase that never stops moving. Rotten Tomatoes says 79 percent from 443 critic reviews and Metacritic says 74 from 63, checked October 22, 2026. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Disclosure Day is about

The film opens in media res, in a pro wrestling match shot in jarring point-of-view close-up, because that is where Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) is making a handoff under duress. Daniel is a nervous-looking cybersecurity expert, and what he is handing over is the only thing his employer has ever made that works: an alien device he stole along with Wardex Corporation's complete archive of recorded alien encounters, running back to Roswell in 1947. His girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is the price Wardex wants in return.

Wardex is not a government agency. It is a private corporation, which is how the funding stays untraceable, and it has been running the United States alien research program since 1973. Its chief executive is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), and he holds hardware that lets him step into other people's minds. Owen Gleiberman at Variety described the setup plainly: the president is cut out of the loop, and Jane, who hides Daniel in a monastery where she was once a novitiate, at first agrees with Scanlon, on the grounds that disclosure would wreck people's relationship with God.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, Missouri, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a television weather presenter, and Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian caught exactly the right note for her. She is a celebrity who treats the weather desk like a runway, and the film knows it. A small red bird flutters into her apartment. After that she speaks Russian and Korean without knowing she is doing it, she reads the traffic cop's fight with his wife on the way to work, and when she goes on air her mouth opens and what comes out is a clicking noise no human throat should be able to make.

The two of them are being hunted. Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a Wardex defector, is coordinating the release, and the film keeps him on the phone, building something we are not shown yet. Daniel is on the run with the device. Margaret is waking up. The movie runs those two tracks at full speed and lets them converge.

Cast and performances

Blunt is the reason to pay for the ticket. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com noticed that she does most of her work without lines: "Blunt's performance can sometimes feel big, but it's also remarkably nuanced, particularly in the amount of work she has to do without lines when she looks into the eyes of another character whose life she can 'see.'" Bradshaw called it "a really funny and hyperactive star performance".

O'Connor plays Daniel with a stillness the film needs, and Tallerico picked out the reason the two leads work, which is that they are people chosen for the moment rather than people who chose it themselves.

Colman Domingo does the film's explaining and does it well, and Colin Firth plays the other end of the same idea, a man who has carried the weight of the secret for a very long time. Eve Hewson gets the hardest job in the cast, because Jane has to believe in the cover-up for most of the running time, and Elizabeth Marvel plays her Mother Superior in the monastery scenes.

What works

The chase. Janusz Kaminski shoots almost always in motion, spinning around the characters and breaking all expected axes of action. Tallerico named the set pieces that stick: "a gorgeous oner as Daniel approaches a farmhouse and in the momentum of a stunning car-meets-train action sequence."

The deadpan. Bradshaw noted that "Only Spielberg could get away with taking two of the world's best-known hoaxes, Roswell and crop circles, and treating them with judicious deadpan respect." Nobody in the film raises their voice about aliens. That restraint is the difference between a conspiracy thriller and a UFO documentary.

And the whole thing is a better chase film than it is a thinking film. Gleiberman's verdict on the level was accurate: "'Disclosure Day' turns out to be a lavishly intense chase thriller with a dollop of deep-think rumination and two characters at its center whose own close encounters have shaped their lives and destinies."

What doesn't

The script cannot stop explaining itself. Tallerico's complaint was precise: "There's so much going on in 'Disclosure Day' that David Koepp's script sometimes trips over itself trying to explain it all, but Spielberg, his ensemble, and his remarkable team are always there to pick up the film." Gleiberman heard the same thing from the other side, writing that the film's debates work as a delaying tactic rather than as argument, and that the childhood flashback is both too mystical and too literal.

The awe never arrives. This is the objection worth holding on to. Gleiberman put it in one line: "Yet coming after the mountains of real UAP footage we've seen, 'Disclosure Day' never gives you the contact high of awe that 'Close Encounters' did." Bradshaw's version of the same objection is about scale. The shark or the alien is scariest when it is unseen, and Disclosure Day puts it on screen, which brings the danger of unintended bathos.

The verdict split. Brian Lowry at Status News gave it 7 out of 10 and wrote that "this middling movie, intriguing but oddly incomplete, doesn't merit those kind of accolades, playing at best like Spielberg Lite." Grant Watson at Fiction Machine gave it 5 out of 10, calling it "a collection of well-shot and paced sequences, and capably staged set pieces, but the underlying narrative is remarkably weak and the nuts-and-bolts structure is poorly conceived."

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 22, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 79 percent from 443 critic reviews, with a 69 percent Popcornmeter from more than 5,000 verified ratings, and its critics consensus reads: "A humanistic variation on one of Steven Spielberg's most revisited themes, Disclosure Day's breathless pursuit of optimism in an age of conspiracy gets its biggest boost from career-highlight work by Emily Blunt." Metacritic has a Metascore of 74 from 63 critic reviews, labelled Generally Favorable, plus a user score of 5.2 from 614 user ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 3.02 out of 5 from 1,099,318 ratings, with 482,140 written reviews. TMDB has it at 7.4 from 3,791 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 22, 2026, and IMDb was bot-blocked throughout, so none of its numbers are quoted here.

That Letterboxd number is the interesting one, and it is the lowest of the set by a distance. Critics like the film and a very large audience mostly did not, which is a different shape of reaction from the usual blockbuster split. Matt Konopka at Dread Central wrote the other side of it, calling it a spellbinding adventure about faith, connection and the wonders of the universe.

Box Office Mojo's figures, read on October 22, 2026, put the film at $116,636,645 domestic and $129,579,055 international for $246,215,700 worldwide, from a United States release on June 12, 2026 that opened with $44,530,925. TMDB's record for the same title gives a $115 million budget.

Where to watch Disclosure Day

In the United States it is a subscription title on Peacock Premium and Peacock Premium Plus, with rental on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home. JustWatch, which checked 376 streaming services on October 22, 2026, lists it the same way and finds no free streaming option anywhere. TMDB's United States watch provider list adds Google Play Movies and YouTube for rental and purchase. The certificate is PG-13. The run time is 146 minutes.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Disclosure Day streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Disclosure Day worth watching? Yes, for Blunt and for the chase, with the running time on the clock. Bradshaw's verdict is hard to argue with. The film is "never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt." Spielberg still wants the audience to feel something enormous, and he gets it more often than not. What he does not get is an answer. The film's question is whether truth makes us better, and the film decides to be about something else just when it has to commit.

The numbers say the same thing from four directions. Rotten Tomatoes says 79 percent, Metacritic says 74, TMDB says 7.4, and Letterboxd's 3.02 says more than 480,000 people who bothered to write something down felt otherwise. Critics are right that it is beautifully made. The audience is right that the argument never arrives. Both of those are the same fact seen from opposite ends of the same chase.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Disclosure Day

Daniel and Margaret were both taken as children. The alien ships came for them in the form of woodland animals, and the devices they wore as rings around their faces are what gave Daniel his gift for mathematics and Margaret her gift for empathy. Their abilities are two halves of the same thing. Daniel decodes the aliens' signal, Margaret carries its meaning.

Hugo Wakefield's plan is to rebuild Margaret's childhood home on a set, on the theory that she will walk into her own memory and remember. The memory arrives in fragments: a deer's head on a turn in the snow that keeps morphing, a spaceship, a frightened little boy, and a little girl who calms him down.

The climax happens at the KCXE newsroom in Kansas City. Daniel, Margaret and Hugo are trying to put 79 years of Wardex files on air. Scanlon cuts the power, and Jane walks in carrying the third device. Margaret uses it and the station comes back on, and she goes to camera and says "This is Disclosure Day." Hugo brings out a living alien, and Daniel translates what it says. The message reduces to one instruction, which Margaret delivers to the whole world, and the word is "Listen." The broadcast goes round the world and everything stops for it. Noah Scanlon, who has spent his career suppressing the truth by force, sits down and listens to it arrive through the proper channels instead.

It is the ending Spielberg wanted, and it earns its sentimentality the hard way, by making you sit through a script that keeps talking to get there.