June 12, 2026

JOHN PODHORETZ REVIEWS DISCLOSURE DAY: 

[W]hat Disclosure Day really evokes is [Spielberg’s] pre-movie television juvenilia—by which I mean his earliest professional work, as a director of series episodes and made-for-TV movies. If you’re not in your 60s, you don’t really know about the Movie of the Week. This was a staple of the American pop-culture junk diet in the 1970s. ABC aired one, or two, movies-of-the-week every week for years. They were the genius brainchild of the visionary Barry Diller, who figured out his network could make original fare for $450,000 a pop rather than paying Universal $600,000. There were comedies, mysteries, ghost stories, sensitive dramas. They ran in a 90-minute time slot, and since they needed to accommodate commercials, they had to be 72 minutes long. They were made quick and dirty, starring series actors on their summer breaks or has-beens between gigs. No one expected them to be good, and they mostly weren’t, but neither was most TV at the time.

Spielberg made four. One was a segment of an anthology called Night Gallery, in which the 22-year-old Spielberg directed the 65-year-old Joan Crawford, playing a mean blind woman who has her sight restored for a day, only to discover there’s a blackout. Another was a Rosemary’s Baby knockoff called Something Evil with the very, very nervous actress Sandy Dennis. Savage was about a reporter who gets dirt on a Supreme Court nominee. But it was the 90-minute car-vs.-truck chase he directed called Duel, universally considered the best MOW ever made, that opened the doors of the cinema wide for him.

Spielberg was the only major director to rise out of the Movie of the Week factory. So there’s something kind of touching about Disclosure Day’s evocation of the junk he had to helm to get his career going. I’m sure that’s not what he intended to do here, since the movie derives from an original idea of his (though the screenplay is by someone else) and is therefore theoretically some kind of passion project. But it’s just too silly to take seriously.

The Critical Drinker wasn’t impressed, either: “Disclosure Day bills itself as a movie of big ideas, but ultimately it feels small both intellectually and creatively. And worst of all, it’s a movie that feels weirdly dated and irrelevant now despite a few clunky references to AI and current-day conflict zones.”

UPDATE: Poor word of mouth isn’t helping the film at the box office:

Spielberg’s recent mutterings that “his alien movie will leave Christians questioning their faith in God” didn’t help its chances at the domestic box office, either.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll