By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: **** RUNTIME: 145 minutes

It’s almost half a century since director Steven Spielberg helmed Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and his 1st film since 2022’s The Fabelmans is his best since 2002’s Minority Report.

• Read on for reasons including how this is a story that bears telling today amid the world’s many current wars

The world is on the brink of war, panic buying is clearing supermarket shelves and Josh O’Connor’s (film The History Of Sound) whistleblower Daniel Kellner is seeking to disclose historic confidential footage of humans torturing aliens.

Meanwhile, Emily Blunt’s (The Devil Wears Prada 2) TV weather forecaster Margaret Fairchild has become inexplicably multilingual, empathetic and starts speaking in an alien tongue only Kellner can understand as she broadcasts live.

Colin Firth plays Noah Scanlan, chief executive of private firm Wardex which is responsible for the footage’s security, who will stop at nothing to ensure Kellner doesn’t deliver it to Colman Domingo’s Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield.

Can Kelner and Fairchild unite to get to Wakefield before being caught by Scanlan so that the titular disclosure day can happen?

Disclosure Day will remind of Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind with Blunt outstanding as a woman whose super power is empathy with O’Connor convincing as both an every man but also a whistleblower with a conscience and an ability to comprehend the mathematical language Blunt can now speak in.

Firth works as an over-the-top villain and Domingo as the apparently all-seeing puppermaster moving all the chess pieces into place for a thrilling denouement.

We won’t spoil the ending other than to say it had an unfortunate ridiculousness about it which reminded us of Tim Burton’s farcical Mars Attacks and also left us wanting an immediate sequel which appears unlikely.

For a story that harks back in its origins as far as the 70s, there is some heft to the argument that it is 1 that bears telling today amid the world’s many current wars and also the US administration’s apparent willingness to throw open its confidential files.

We were worried about the extended runtime but it was only towards the film’s end that we started to wonder about the time left to tell the story we thought we were going to see.

Disclosure Day then is Spielberg’s best film for more than 20 years but not as culturally defining as greats such as Jaws, ET, Jurassic Park and Raiders Of The Lost Ark but then it is a back catalogue to die for.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Disclosure Day
• Have you seen a Josh O’Connor film before and what did you think of this 1? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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