Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
If you watch TV, you likely know Jeremy Shamos, an experienced actor who turns up in a small role in Disclosure Day as a floor director in a Kansas City TV news studio. Shamos is not a leading man, nor does he have the distinctive features of a born character actor. He has three or four scenes in Disclosure Day, and is not vitally important to its momentum, yet he has a couple of moments in the climactic sequence that pay off in ways that are both emotionally and structurally satisfying. The role is written that way, but Shamos and his particular actor's tools really help a lot: a certain fussiness, skepticism, a little "I'm not sure about this, but let's roll."
The eye of Steven Spielberg extends in many directions, but he has always been good at finding people for the screen, for little roles as well as big ones. Part of Spielberg's vision of shared peoplehood and communication and generosity is embedded in how much he cares about the "little people" in his films; he doesn't just mouth those platitudes, he expresses his themes in the way his movies exist. Disclosure Day is crammed with a veritable rainbow coalition of actors in small roles, and you can tell that Spielberg studied each one of them for a particular vibe. This also extends to the larger roles, of course, as movie-star dazzle is sidestepped for the more down-to-earth presence of Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Eve Hewson, and Wyatt Russell. Colin Firth stands out for his Englishness and crisp style, but then he's the villain of the piece. Colman Domingo, being Colman Domingo, also stands out, but Spielberg sees his empathy, not his style.
And the movie is, sometimes clumsily, about empathy, it turns out. (Spoilers—but are they?—to follow.) Blunt, as a TV weather forecaster, and O'Connor, as a rogue former government employee with secrets to share, are two people on parallel adventures that will lead them to Devil's Tower. Sorry, that was the other Spielberg picture—they are being chased and hounded because they have something to do with the government's knowledge of aliens and UFOs. It begins, splendidly, in media res, and takes the form of a chase picture, which is a) something our director knows how to orchestrate, and b) jarring, given the weightiness of the film's ideas.
David Koepp's screenplay (based on a Spielberg story) has its share of wonderfully odd moments, such as Blunt breaking out into fluent Russian upon seeing a red bird, or supposed clandestine footage of Richard Nixon showing Jackie Gleason around a Florida top-secret site where the alien bodies are stashed. I am, to be sure, there for this. But Spielberg has a point to make, about how we treat the Other, and God's place in the universe (or at least our place in relation to God's place in the universe), and getting from the fun sci-fi chase to the issues of the day is not always a comfortable glide. The mood of the Flesh Fair from A.I. is in the air, rather than the giddy declaration that "I saw Bigfoot once," to compare moments from the Spielberg collection.
If I sense that things aren't entirely meshing along the way, that might come from the feeling that Spielberg is a little too insistent on his messages; for all those pre-Schindler years he was the boy-director whose work was too enjoyable to take seriously, and he still has lectures he wants to give. But there are haunting things in Disclosure Day, including the way Domingo's team is constructing something inside a warehouse, the specifics of which are not clear until late in the action, except that it involves an exact re-production of a childhood space connected to trauma.
This re-creation leads us to the other haunting element of Disclosure Day, which is the extent to which it is, like many of Spielberg's movies, about the cinema. Domingo and his crew are building a set, the better to understand the past. At its core, the film's story relies on movie footage to prove that the rumors about aliens are true, and its old-fashioned premise is that seeing is believing, so when the world looks at decades' worth of film of UFOs, we will all be changed. That Spielberg delivers this article of faith at the exact moment that we are abandoning the truth-telling power of the moving image in favor of AI, digital effects, and the cynical curating by politicians and corporations who will manipulate images for their own gain, is either a bold attempt at reclaiming that power or a rather naïve one.
June 12, 2026
