movie-review

‘Disclosure Day’ Sure is From the Person Who Made ‘Minority Report’ Twenty-Five Years Ago
L to R: Colman Domingo is Hugo Wakefield, Tommy Martinez is Santiago, Emily Blunt is Margaret Fairchild, and Josh O’Connor is Dr. Daniel Kellner in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Of course it’s being touted as Spielberg’s best in twenty years. The guy who made E.T., Jurassic Park, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind has spent the last couple decades veering into BFG and Ready Player One. A grand return to hard sci-fi is no doubt anticipated by audiences excited to see what it’s like to have the rightfully revered filmmaker back on his best beat. There’s no shortage of excitement when a lens flare or a reference to outer space pops up on the silver screen, but for his grand return, Spielberg’s story about government secrets, regular people, and alien invasions feels like a flat trip on the outskirts of different genres mired by unfinished ideas about our world.

Emily Blunt, in what I might deem a career best performance developing a character very out-of-type, is one of two major leads alongside Josh O’Connor who is working really hard to act through his accent. There’s most nothing to connect the vapid but ambitious weather woman to an on-the-run tech genius, but their paths inevitably cross based on some unexplainable universal pull. Daniel (O’Connor) is running from a spooky private contractor tasked by the government with keeping some secret they believe humanity cannot handle. A change of heart leaves him trying to deliver hard drives full of footage to his handler so they can reveal it to the masses. Margaret (Blunt) was a weather woman when she started her day, but after a mysterious visit from a cardinal, she is suddenly able to speak and understand multiple languages, compel people with psychic knowledge, and just knows she has to find Daniel. In the middle is Hugo (Coleman Domingo) trying to support their paths to each other so they can solve something and inform the world of what has been happening on the other side of a dark curtain that even the president hasn’t seen behind.

It’s one part chase movie and one part heady science fiction and manages to spread too far between those things to excel at either. A quiet heady drama about whether the people can or should be ethically given this kind of information is interrupted for oddly shot chase scenes and action sequences that will really remind you you’re not watching Minority Report but something a bit like it. “As good as his other movie” is not a fair or accurate metric but where that movie managed to blend ethics and philosophy into science fiction action, Disclosure Day seems to clunkily ramrod a train sequence into a half-baked idea about ethics and disclosure in an attempt to keep it exciting. Conversations about the ethics are cut off, notions of private companies with government contracts are passing fodder, and the religious subplot to support extra-terrestrial beings is starkly out of place. Sci-fi mumbo jumbo and more interesting expansions on alien powers are left unexplained, and entire world war happens quietly in the background. My best attempt at giving credit to a team as otherwise exceptional as Spielberg and co-writer, David Koepp, is to wonder if it’s about the secrets kept from the masses and how if we were forced to face the visual truth of what actions are doing to harm living things, we might adjust our perspective and actions. Unfortunately, this read puts a lot of faith in the idea that people would immediately trust a leaked alien autopsy.

Disclosure Day is magical because it puts a great back in his wheelhouse and has a wicked actress stretching beyond hers. But its unfortunately confusing morality conversations and flimsy plot devices makes for a bit of a strange slog that’ll make you want to see any other alien come walking out of any other ship.

Disclosure Day hits theaters June 12, 2026.

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ Wants You To Look up From Your Phone at Sam Rockwell
Briarcliff Entertainmnent

It can be challenging to put your phone away for the entire runtime of a movie and challenging still for some to not immediately grab it as the credits roll to log that movie on an app or post a quick reaction. Social media and the dopamine box in our pockets sing a sweet siren song, one that will hopefully be dulled by Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. In a meta-comment that asks us to pay attention, this latest wacky surrealist dark comedy has us to consider what the internet and AI are taking from us, and encourages us to act sooner rather than later.

Sam Rockwell leads as no Kyle Reese but an unnamed time traveler purporting to be from a bleak not-so-distant future. He’s seen the collapse of modern life due to a propensity towards social media brain rot that left half the population dead and the other unknowingly living in an apocalyptic hellscape. With a grain of knowledge that this night in this diner is the way to solve the future crisis, the time traveler gathers whatever combination of people seem willing to join his revolution hoping to find the magical combination that makes his plan succeed lest he have to start the night over again. While the future sees humanity doomed to live inside a utopic videogame, the man seems to live in a modern one where any failure means he must start from the beginning. On his hundredth or so attempt, he seems as close as ever.

Director Gore Verbinski came out of a decade-long retirement to get his scent on this zany dark comedy. Some of his slappier sensibilities came along for the ride, imbued mostly within Rockwell as the weirdo lead in a dirty clear trenchcoat you would follow into battle. This close-to-home feature about where we all seem to be headed is as fun as possible, marked with dark deadpan humour and an ensemble cast you won’t believe gave themselves over.

For all its zany bits, social satire, and pitch-black lampoons of our bizarre social media loving planet, there is a distinct lack of real teeth. Sure, it’s dystopic that teachers have caved to students and their phones and that cloned children are subsidized by the government if they’re victims of school shootings, but the satire hesitates to push past the glaring and lacks that brutal bite. (In good news for those who enjoy this movie and want more of the same) Films like Spontaneous have employed such bleak satire before with sharper effect, making Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die seem like a flick trying to catch up to its cohorts. It’s full up with references to Terminator, The Faculty, and the like, some meta-films themselves that have already been rolled into movies like Cooties, Ick, and Mom and Dad.

The non-linear storytelling is the strongest element of the narrative as it has the audience find the hero already well into his crusade, then gives it time to take in haunting vignettes that highlight just how weird things have gotten. Time is well spent with the complacent teachers struggling to capture students’ attention, a grieving mother trying to bond with an ad supported clone, and a young woman allergic to wi-fi. But for as zany as the vignettes are, they are built on similar on-the-nose messaging that’s been better executed by similar movies.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is exciting for the fact that it’s got a familiar cast and crew that will draw broader audiences into the weird-sci-fi-dark-comedy fray that’ll leave people primed to be referred to things like Relax, I’m From the Future, Rumours, Dream Scenario, and those others I couldn’t resist mentioning above. 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hits theaters February 13, 2026

Fantasia 2025: ‘Burning’ is a Surprisingly Feminist Rashomon Thriller
Fantasia Film Festival

It’s only a matter of coincidence that I recently made my way through Little Fires Everywhere which also started in media res with characters reacting to a home burning down leaving the audience to wonder what led to it. The similarities between these stories mostly ends there, but Burning does have that in common with the limited series.

Burning (or Ot), out of Kyrgyzstan, is somewhat of a black box for those unfamiliar with the film culture of the area or who know director Radik Eshimov from his work in television production (where he focuses on comedy). Though there are few laughs to be found in this haunting tale of subjective truth that ends in a pile of ash and a conversation lit by flashing lights.

As I mentioned, the movie begins after the fire as townspeople gather around the local convenience store (or “depanneur” for the Montreal festival audience) to swap stories of the days leading up to the events. The movie is then broken into three parts, each being from the second-hand perspective of someone who was in the house: the husband, the wife, the mother-in-law. It becomes a spooky tale that cleverly uses shifting perspectives and repeated moments and lines to change the views of the happenings without changing the ultimate truth. Eagle-eye watchers who prefer to examine scenes for what isn’t being shown directly will have fun here, but beyond that, audiences are slowly forced to face truth, subjectivity, and perspective as the movie rails on.

At the risk of saying too much, what’s special is how this movie discusses subjective truth and the perspectives of women, especially how they are squashed in larger conversations. “Maybe it’s all just a lie,” and “what if it’s the truth?” mark the final scene and were left seared into my field of vision as the finale pressed on. Burning’s Rashomon style tale so well examines the idea in a way that will ring relevant for most anyone on any side of any border.

But it does so without ever forgetting that it’s a horror movie. In ways reminiscent of Rear Window or Attachment in how it lets the horrors exist while characters might be unreliable or misinterpreting what’s in front of them. There are hard to watch gross-out scenes, djinn focused and other religious frights, and the scares one might associate with Rosemary’s Baby. Everyone has a turn at playing the monster, even those just recounting the tales as told to them.

Burning is the festival movie that utterly surprised me, showing up unsuspectingly as a haunt about a witchy mother-in-law and her immature charges as told through the eyes of gossips. As its story pressed on and the horror escalated, my expectations were delightfully subverted and I was left well-fed by such a rich horror story.

Burning played at the Fantasia Film Festival