Reviews For Disclosure Day Are A Big Thumbs Up, But I Think This Movie Is Going To Be More Polarizing Than You Think
Yesterday, just days before Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated Disclosure Day hits the 2026 movie calendar, CinemaBlend staff members left an early screening and were generally happy with the results. John Williams’ throwback soundtrack gives ‘80s vibes, Emily Blunt slaps, and as a whole it really felt like a return to the director’s roots. Not surprisingly, those were the vibes of the over-the-top first reactions, as well as critics’ reviews, which dropped today.
However, I think Steven Spielberg’s fifth movie about aliens may end up being more polarizing than one might assume. Let’s see what the Disclosure Day reviews are saying, as well as what we overheard leaving the movie theater.
Liz Shannon Miller of Consequence rates it a B+, saying that Emily Blunt is the MVP in a movie that shows how Spielberg has matured over the years while maintaining his belief in life on other planets and his faith in humanity. The critic says:
In Disclosure Day, director Steven Spielberg isn’t just wielding one of his most famous tropes — he’s weaponizing it, using it as a major plot device in a fast-paced story rich with both adult sophistication and childlike wonder. Disclosure Day is both small and massive in scope — focused on a few specific characters over the course of a few days. That tightness could feel claustrophobic, except it allows the film to explore huge themes about faith and aliens, and how the existence of one might affect the other. In between the car chases, that is.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire also gives the movie a B+, saying the director is “giddy” with excitement to share this fantastically entertaining story about how we are not alone in the world. Watching Disclosure Day in a theater full of captivated movie lovers all gasping at the same things only drives that message home further, Ehrlich says, writing:
While Spielberg has never lost his sense of fun, Disclosure Day is uniquely fortified by the sense that he’s still searching for new ways to enrapture a jaded audience with his spectacle, and the movie’s ethos becomes that much harder to deny every time its director manages to suspend our disbelief all over again. There might not be anything here quite as inventive as the spider robot sequence from Minority Report, but a certain setpiece — the one that starts with a car getting shoved into an oncoming freight train — is as gripping as Hollywood action gets.
David Rooney of THR says no living director understands the magic and power of movies more than Steven Spielberg, and while Disclosure Day touches on our fear of the unknown, the overwhelming themes of the movie are hope, truth, empathy and spirituality. The cast also could not be better, Rooney says, writing:
In terms of craftsmanship, Spielberg is in peak form. Working with his longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who is painting here in a muted color palette pierced by beautiful lighting, the director blocks every shot for maximum dramatic impact, the camera moving with a grace and control that reaffirm his reputation as a consummate visual storyteller. For anyone who has loved his movies, Disclosure Day will be an essential addition to Spielberg’s rich body of work.
So yeah, this mostly seems like good news, right? And I think it will be for a lot of moviegoers this weekend. However, amongst the above glowing sentiments, Liz Shannon Miller felt some elements of the ending were underbaked; David Ehrlich found the writing “clunky,” and David Rooney found the CGI animals distracting and “borderline cheesy.”
It’s also worth pointing out that our own Editor-in-Chief did not like John Williams’ soundtrack, and we also heard people around us expressing confusion about some of the movie’s big questions.
The reviews weren’t all positive, either. Nicholas Barber of the BBC gives it just 2 out of 5 stars, calling it a “major disappointment.” Rather than an alien movie, Barber says it’s an “outdated car chase thriller” with absolutely no new ideas about aliens. He writes:
The main themes – whether aliens and a supreme deity can co-exist, and why empathy is important – are conveyed by people making long, polished speeches about them. And its thesis on alien life is so amazingly uninspired that you’d assume that Spielberg had pondered it for several minutes, not several decades.
This last critic seems to be in the minority, however, as the film is already Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with 89%. As happy as I am to see that we’re having a summer of Steven Spielberg, I’m very interested to see whether this continues to be a “two thumbs up” movie once it officially hits theaters.
We don’t have long to wait, as Disclosure Day will be on the big screen starting Friday, June 12.
