Monthly Archives: June 2026

‘Disclosure Day’ Does. Kind Of.


Steven Spielberg makes movies the way other directors make promises.

attractingly “Disclosure Day” begins where the UAP hearings left off. Congress gave Unidentified Aerial Phenomena its bureaucratic name, retired the UFO, and left the harder question unasked. Spielberg asks it. Not whether we are alone, but what becomes of us the moment we find out we are not.

Emily Blunt plays a Kansas City TV anchor who begins experiencing the uncanny firsthand. She is extraordinary. She makes you believe something impossible is happening to a woman who cannot quite believe it herself. Josh O’Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth fill out a cast that Spielberg handles with the confidence of a director who has forgotten more about performance than most have learned. The script, from longtime collaborator David Koepp, builds its conspiracy with patience and real menace.

The set pieces earn their keep. A train sequence delivers the kind of tactile, old-school tension that digital filmmaking has spent twenty years trying to replicate and mostly failing. John Williams scores it all. Whatever you expect from that combination, double it. Some things age into cliché. This does not.

And yet the aliens here walk upright and carry meaning. They suggest, as Spielberg’s visitors always have, that contact is really about reflection. These are not the grinding machines of “War of the Worlds.” They are inheritors of Roy Neary’s awe and Elliott’s bicycle against the moon. Spielberg has said the creatures might represent humanity 500,000 years forward. That is an intellectually interesting idea. On screen it plays safe.

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” earned that vision. “E.T.” broke your heart with it. Here it lands more softly than the material deserves.

The film carries a PG-13 rating and feels every bit of it. The edges stay rounded. The wonder arrives on schedule. A director pushing 80, making a film about hope and governmental deception, has every right to sand his corners. The government conspiracy thread runs through the whole picture, rich with current-events resonance, and it deserves a harder landing than it gets. The adult audience this material invites sometimes finds the door only halfway open.

His fascination with beings who look like us, feel like us, and ultimately want the best for us remains his most comfortable idea. It is also his least challenging one. “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” justified that warmth because they left something unresolved. Something strange lived at the edges. You carried it home with you. “Disclosure Day” ties its bow a little too neatly. You leave the theater satisfied rather than haunted.

None of that undoes what works. Blunt commands every scene she enters. The craft is immaculate. Spielberg still knows where to put the camera, when to hold, and when to cut. Those instincts do not age. He has made a lot of movies. He still knows things most directors will never learn. This is the best film he has made in years, and in a career like his, that still means something considerable.

The truth, it turns out, belongs to eight billion people. Some of them wanted it just a little darker.

Preteen Nation


America has become a country of twelve-year-olds.

Look no further than the president of the United States, who showed up at the NBA Finals last night not to watch basketball but to drink in the boos. Donald Trump has mastered the one skill that defines the American preteen: making every room about himself.

He is not the cause. He is the product.

The impatient kind. The kind that wants the answer before the question and the trophy before the game.

The internet accelerated what we became. We built the systems long before the first smartphone left the factory. Politicians learned to speak in slogans because nuance costs votes.

Networks tell you how to feel before telling you what happened. Hollywood explains the joke three times because audiences stopped trusting themselves. Patience became a character flaw somewhere between Watergate and the first iPhone.

We stopped making art that demanded something of us and started demanding that art require nothing. The highest compliment a movie gets now is that it flew by. A book that makes you work for it sits on the remainder table.

Social media gave the tantrum a megaphone. A congressman tweets his grievances at midnight. A school board meeting ends in a shouting match over a library book. The loudest voice in the room stopped being the wisest one and started being the one we listened to.

We used to disagree in paragraphs. Now we do it in capital letters. The argument collapsed into the insult, the insult collapsed into the meme, and the meme became the political platform.

FDR’s fireside chats assumed an adult on the other end of the radio. That adult is gone. We traded the long arc for the instant hit, the considered vote for the bumper sticker, the difficult conversation for the muted thread.

We used to elect leaders who asked something hard of us. We now elect the ones who tell us someone else is to blame. The preteen never owns the mistake and always names a villain.

The economy runs on our distraction. Algorithms feed us content that makes us feel wronged, because outrage keeps us scrolling. Anger became the product and we became the market.

The same country that rewired the world, won two world wars, and put a man on the moon now has the collective attention span of a kid waiting for recess. We built civilization and then lost interest in it. That is the real crisis, not the phone in your pocket but the indifference in your chest.

Somewhere along the way maturity stopped looking like wisdom and started looking like weakness.

Twelve-year-olds did not do this to themselves. Adults built the platforms, elected the leaders, and bought the products. We chose comfort over citizenship and called it freedom.

Adulthood is still in there somewhere, buried under the notifications and the noise and the need to be right about everything. It is waiting to be remembered.

The good news is that twelve-year-olds usually grow up. Time has come for us to be ready for PG-13 movies.