For about half a century, Steven Spielberg’s cinema has taught audiences how to look up. Since his very first close encounter back in 1977 at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming —  and a series of others involving a stranded visitor in suburban California, ancient artifacts hidden beneath atomic anxieties, and menacing tripods rising from beneath American soil — the veteran auteur has repeatedly turned to the stars in search of something profoundly terrestrial. 

At 79, returning to stories of the Third Kind with Disclosure Day, Spielberg is still making films in an industry shaped by his own successes, but the remarkable thing is that this beloved unc has still got the sauce. Even now, he grasps that intangible something many contemporary event movies seem to have forgotten: that cinema is at its most powerful when a room full of strangers briefly share the same wide-eyed astonishment.

Written by longtime collaborator David Koepp from a story developed with Spielberg, Disclosure Day opens in the middle of a crisis. Josh O’Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity expert employed by WARDEX, a secretive contractor that has concealed evidence of alien contact dating back to the infamous Roswell Incident. After stealing classified archives and an extraterrestrial device, Daniel becomes a fugitive pursued by WARDEX director Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), who is convinced that secrecy serves civilisation. Across Missouri, television meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly acquires inexplicable abilities, speaking unfamiliar languages, perceiving strangers’ memories through eye contact, and emitting uncanny guttural gibberish during a live broadcast. Spielberg constructs these parallel narratives as converging roads.

The premise carries obvious echoes of The X-Files, post-Snowden whistleblower culture, and decades of UFO conspiracy discourse that have moved from tinfoil hat hokum to actual declassified U.S. congressional hearings over the last few years. Yet Spielberg’s interest lies elsewhere because alien revelation serves as an instrument for him to examine emotional distance. The writing repeatedly gestures to how humanity has been severed from community, separated by gulfs larger than interstellar space, and that concern has threaded through Spielberg’s work since Richard Dreyfuss abandoned domestic life in Close Encounters and Tom Cruise’s fractured family in War of the Worlds struggled to survive invasion while barely understanding one another.

What makes Disclosure Day feel expectedly rejuvenated is Spielberg’s evergreen craftsmanship. Reuniting with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński for their latest collaboration in a creative partnership that began with Schindler’s List over three decades ago, Spielberg once again proves that he remains perhaps Hollywood’s greatest cartographer of cinematic space. His extraordinary feel for blocking creates and maintains the seamless illusion that life is simply happening in front of the camera, even though every movement has been orchestrated down to the inch.

The ensemble understands the assignment, though the film ultimately belongs to Emily Blunt. Margaret spends much of the story caught between omniscience and bewilderment, suddenly able to peer into the private lives of strangers while barely understanding what is happening inside her own head, and Blunt plays that contradiction with extraordinary dexterity. O’Connor remains one of this decade’s great specialists in fragile men carrying far too much in their anxious frames, and Daniel joins a growing gallery of characters who seem permanently startled by their own importance.

The film’s thesis ultimately crystallises in the ideological tug-of-war between Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield and Firth’s Scanlon, two aging bureaucrats staring at the same cosmic truth and arriving at opposite conclusions about humanity. Scanlon sees this terrible revelation as a virus that would devastate the order of the world, while Hugo argues that empathy remains humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantage, the trait that transformed vulnerable social animals into a species capable of cooperation on planetary scales.

Spielberg keeps his interstellar visitors at the edge of visibility for much of the film, allowing weathered archival footage to do the heavy lifting. The final Disclosure Day declassifcations eventually unveil the familiar ‘Roswell Greys’ — the smooth-skinned extraterrestrials prototypes with oversized craniums and black almond eyes that have captivated American UFO lore since the alleged 1947 crash in New Mexico. Spielberg has finally come full circle, borrowing from a mythology that spent half a century borrowing from Spielberg. 

Of course, there is also good old John Williams. At 94, cinema’s greatest living composer returns for his 30th collaboration with Spielberg, and his evocative score knows exactly when to soar and when to recede into silence. If this proves to be their farewell, it feels fitting that the two leave the same way they began half a century ago, still chasing wonder with the conviction of true believers, and having furnished generations of audiences with some of their very first memories of the movies.

If Disclosure Day stumbles, it does so in the places where Spielberg’s faith in humanity brushes with the historical record of the past fifteen years. The film hammers home the point that releasing proof of alien life would fundamentally reorder civilisation, even as the world it depicts is already sleepwalking through nuclear brinkmanship and institutional collapse. There is something almost touching about Spielberg’s conviction that revelation still possesses civic power, but the realities of the digital age have been considerably less cooperative to believe otherwise. 

The screenplay also leaves several of its most intriguing ideas stranded at the margins. Eve Hewson’s Jane Blankenship, Daniel’s girlfriend and a former novitiate nun whose crisis of faith should place her at the centre of the film’s theological anxieties, remains frustratingly underwritten. Her scenes with Elizabeth Marvel’s compassionate Mother Superior gesture toward fascinating questions about religion in a universe populated by non-human intelligence, though the film never lingers long enough to wrestle with their implications. Curiously, the same thinness applies to the alien mythology itself. The inscrutable alien devices so deeply embedded within the story are frustratingly underdefined, and the screenplay often treats the extraterrestrial tech as convenient solvents for obstacles or lapses in writing.

Yet whatever objections I had overall, all dissolved before Spielberg’s oldest and most elusive ability to reduce even the most oversmart, irony-poisoned adult like me, back into a child staring at the impossible. I often find myself yearning for the feeling that Jaws, Jurassic Park, and E.T. left behind when I first encountered them as a kid, with that wondrous, overwhelming conviction that the world had somehow grown larger. Very few filmmakers have managed to reproduce that feeling in the decades since. Fewer still have left me as astonished at the miracles of cinema the way Spielberg has. He remains one of cinema’s last great humanists, stubbornly insisting that looking toward the stars might teach us how to better inhabit the Earth. For anyone who grew up on his films, this is essential late-period Spielberg, and a jolly good time at the movies.

Disclosure Day is currently running in theatres