Disclosure Day (and a bonus review!)

Steven Spielberg is one of the greatest directors in cinema history. But that doesn't mean that every single one of his films is a masterpiece. Disclosure Day is mid-tier Spielberg. This ain't no E.T. This ain't no Jaws. But not all movies can be E.T. or Jaws. 

Disclosure Day is a perfectly fine popcorn flick about a government conspiracy to cover up 80 years of evidence of aliens and the few people who know the truth and will go to any lengths to release that truth to the world because "people have a right to know".

Let me say this right off the bat: this movie doesn't make sense in 2026. It is exactly the wrong message and tone for what we know now about the government and about the amount (or lack thereof) that people care about "the truth". We live in a world where we KNOW that there are government conspiracies and that the existence of aliens is the least of our worries. We KNOW that people DON'T care about the truth and that the truth will NOT bring us together. So while Disclosure Day would have been an excellent and powerful film if it came out in 1990, it just feels like a joke in 2026. 

If you suspend your disbelief about the message of Disclosure Day, the plot is quite entertaining. A cybersecurity specialist, Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), steals not only video evidence of alien beings, but a device that allows the user to control other people's minds and actions. Daniel goes on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), and the CEO of Wardex (a private security company tasked with hiding the evidence of aliens and other government secrets), Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), uses everything at his disposal to find them before Daniel can release the evidence to the world.

Meanwhile in Kansas City, weather reporter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) has what appears to be a breakdown on live TV where she begins making these throaty clicking sounds no one can understand. She's also able to speak basically any language and read minds. For reasons she can't understand, she is compelled to find Daniel (a complete stranger to her) and help him with his mission. 

As you can see, there is A LOT going on in Disclosure Day and, frankly, not a lot of it is explained. One of the overarching messages of the film is that the alien beings use empathy as a survival strategy and want to give us humans that level of empathy so we don't all kill each other in WWIII. But this idea isn't really elaborated on. This is a movie that would have excelled as a miniseries. If it had the time to really explore the technology and lore, it would have been that much more interesting. Instead, it throws everything at the wall and expects us, the audience, to care and understand. 

Defenders of the film are very insistent that we don't need all the answers, we don't need the lore explained, we should ignore plot holes and any questions we have about why and how. I'm sorry, but that's a load of BS! Sure, some suspension of disbelief is fine. But Disclosure Day wants to be "important". It takes itself very seriously while not delivering the emotional transcendence it promises. Like I said, it's the exact wrong movie for the exact wrong time period. It's not so much that I don't believe in aliens...it's that I don't believe in the humans in this film. 

However, there is one really good thing that come out of Disclosure Day: it encouraged me to re-watch Spielberg's 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There are folks who are saying that Disclosure Day is comparable to A.I. (it's not. A.I. is a masterpiece and Disclosure Day is a popcorn flick) and saying that Disclosure Day will be looked back on as a misunderstood masterpiece (it will not. People won't think about Disclosure Day much at all 5 years from now and if they do, they will think of it as one of Spielberg's lesser works). ALL THIS SAID...it led me to rewatch A.I. for the first time in 20 years and gottdamn if it doesn't hold up!

A.I. was, famously, meant to be directed by Stanley Kubrick. When he died, Spielberg took over the project and made it into an homage to Kubrick while also giving it that Spielbergian touch of humanity. The result is a profoundly emotional film about the nature of love and humanity that still has that signature Kubrickian clinical coldness. 

The film takes place in a future where climate change has destroyed much of Earth and childbearing is tightly controlled. Also, humanoid robots are a thriving market. There are robot nannies, robot lovers, and robot workers. But Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) wants to create a child robot that can truly, actually love. This would fill a void for childless couples who cannot have children of their own (and not to mention, make bank!). 

It just so happens that the company making these robots has the perfect guinea pigs in mind: Henry and Monica Swinton (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor). Henry works for the company making these child robots and he and Monica have a son who is ill and will likely never recover. They allow Henry to take home David (Haley Joel Osment), a prototype robot child. David is initially a kind and polite, if generic, robot. He follows Monica around all day. But his features are not yet put to full use. When Monica is ready, she can read a series of words to David that will make David truly love her the way a child unconditionally loves a mother. Monica eventually does this, and in doing so, damns David to an eternity of unrequited love. 

A.I. is a heartbreaking film that pulls no punches (well, maybe pulls more punches than it would have if Kubrick directed it). When Monica and Henry's son Martin miraculously recovers, it's only a matter of time before David is pushed out of the family unit. Monica simply cannot love David as much as she loves her own son, and when David innocently and accidentally hurts Martin, it's game over. At the same time, Monica is a moral coward. She can't bear the thought of David being destroyed by the robotics company, so she just abandons him in the woods! She loves his too much to allow him to "die", but not enough to keep him in the family. Frances O'Connor's performance is just SO good as a woman in an impossible situation.

The rest of the film follows David's journey to find the Blue Fairy, whom he heard about in Pinocchio. He thinks that if he finds this Blue Fairy, she will make him a real boy and Monica will love him. 

Watching A.I., even though it's a long movie and even though I've seen it before, I was enthralled. I wasn't goofing around on my phone or taking snack breaks. I was almost hypnotized by the movie and it hit even harder than it did when I first saw it in high school. It also brings up a lot of interesting questions about what humans owe artificial intelligence. We live in a world in which increasingly complex A.I. actually exists and there are even "slurs" directed at A.I. The idea that you could insult or hurt A.I. sounds stupid as hell...but what if the A.I. looked human? What if it COULD actually love? Would that change anything? In A.I. David ends up at a "Flesh Fair" -- a rally where people mutilate and kill robots in a "celebration of life". The people at this event are portrayed as white trash redneck types and the event feels like a monster truck rally. But I know some people who hate artificial intelligence so fucking much, I could see them going to something like this. Artificial intelligence is scary, but humans are scarier, eh? Never underestimate the power of human sadism when faced with something that threatens us.

Having people talk about Disclosure Day and A.I. Artificial Intelligence as if they're on the same level just feels laughable to me. The two films aren't even close in terms of style, script, acting, and profundity. Disclosure Day is a perfectly acceptable action film with some excellent sequences and solid acting (especially Emily Blunt). But if you're looking for a movie that will really challenge you and probably make you weep, give A.I. a watch. It's the more difficult film of the two, and by far the more rewarding one. 

Disclosure Day: B-

A.I. Artificial Intelligence: A+

I Love Boosters

Director Boots Riley makes films that make me literally bark with laughter. His mixture of audacity and absurdism hits my funny bone in a way many other comedies do not. In 2018 Riley's first film Sorry to Bother You came out and it was unlike anything I've seen before. Riley's films are satires poking fun at capitalism and racism in ways that would feel ridiculously on the nose coming from any other filmmaker, but in Riley's capable hands the over-the-top elements work perfectly.

Riley is back with another satire of capitalism, I Love Boosters. Boosters are people who steal from retail stores and sell the lifted wares at a discounted prices. Corvette (Keke Palmer) is our main character and is part of a group called the "Velvet Gang" alongside Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige). They primarily lift from Metro Designers stores, which are run by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), a fashion designer whom Corvette--a budding designer herself--has admiration for (despite Smith being a horrible person).

The first third or so of I Love Boosters is pretty straightforward, with the Velvet Gang hatching a plan to get jobs at Metro Designers so they can loot the store of its inventory. The absurdist elements are in visual gags and corporate speak. However, an insane twist occurs at this point which sends the film into a whole new realm of absurdity (and science-fiction). So stop reading here if you want to be surprised!

*spoilers ahead*

One day while working at Metro Designers, the gang comes off a break to find that the entire store is empty. Someone else has come in and wiped out the store's entire inventory in the 5 minutes everyone was in the back room. CCTV footage reveals a woman opening her purse and all the clothes getting sucked into it. The Velvet Gang is set on finding the woman with the "magic bag". They hunt the woman--Jianhu (Poppy Liu)--down and it turns out that it's not the bag that is magic, but the device inside of the bag: a teleporter. 

Jianhu's family works at a sweatshop in China where all the Metro Designers clothes are made and they're paid shit wages and work in conditions that make them sick and even give them cancer. Jianhu and her cousin, Li Pan (Alan Z), discover that the sweatshop is experimenting with teleporters to cut down on shipping costs. They steal the teleporters and hatch a plan for Jianhu to go to the United States and teleport all the Metro Designers clothes back to China and hold the clothes until Christie Smith meets the workers' demands.

So the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for different reasons: Jianhu wants to help her family, Corvette wants to get back at Christie Smith for stealing one of Corvette's designs, and Sade just wants to keep selling the boosted clothes at a discounted price. Meanwhile, a coworker from Metro Designers, Violeta (Eiza Conzalez), keeps trying to get the gang to join her union efforts. The bigger message the film is trying to convey is that even when we have different reasons for fighting "the Man", we are more powerful together than we are separately. 

I Love Boosters is so packed, visually and thematically, that I have only scratched the surface on explaining the plot. If the film has a weakness it's that there is so much going on, especially in the final third of the movie, that it begins to feel incoherent. However, that's just how Boots Riley does things. The film is maximalist, with shit shoved into every corner of every frame and insane ideas bursting out like a snake bursting out of a can of mixed nuts. 

And I haven't even mentioned LaKeith Stanfield's role as a demon who sucks people's souls out while going down on them! 

In any case, I'm not going to run through the entire plot because we'd be here all night. I Love Boosters ends on a wildly optimistic note that will hit differently for different people. Some people see it as just another element of absurdism: the idea that everything can work out in the end is absurd! Others will perhaps see it as bad writing or a cop-out. 

I see the ending as one of many elements that makes I Love Boosters a very feminist/womanist film. Not only are all the main characters women (and most of them women of color), but I Love Boosters has this vibe of community, humor, joy, and care that feels very female activism coded. Something that really struck me is that when Christie Smith is defeated, nothing bad or violent happens to her. She just walks away, weary at the fact that she is forced to meet the workers' demands. This isn't a film about revenge and punishment (two things that play right back into individualism, capitalism, racism, and misogyny), it's about coming together as a group to care for one's community. Something horrific happening to Christie wouldn't have fit the overall tone of the movie which is playful and humorous. Even though the film is directed by a man, it felt more feminist to me than a lot of other social-political satires. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but that's the feeling I was left with after the film was over. 

I Love Boosters is great fun and will reward multiple viewings since it is stuffed full of eye-popping colors and visual gags. 

Grade: A

Stuff I watched in...May, 2026

Hokum

I rushed out to see the newest film from Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy. The director's last film, Oddity, was one of my favorites of 2024 and one of the most genuinely terrifying films I had seen in a while. McCarthy has a knack for building tension to the boiling point and then releasing that tension with jump scares that don't feel predictable. I just about jumped out of my skin multiple times while watching Oddity.

Hokum is perhaps not *quite* as effective or good as Oddity, but it's still incredibly solid and fun. Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, an author who travels to a hotel in rural Ireland where his parents honeymooned. Ohm is an absolutely miserable son of a bitch. He's rude, mean, and drinks too much. He also has a habit of butting into other people's business and sticking his nose where it doesn't belong. After making a connection with a hotel staff member, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), only to find out she went missing during the hotel's Halloween party, Ohm sneaks into a forbidden and cut-off part of the hotel: the honeymoon suite.

There, Ohm finds horrors beyond comprehension. I'm really holding back on the plot of Hokum so that you, dear reader, can discover it for yourself. But there are jump scares and disturbing imagery aplenty. Adam Scott is an interesting choice for a horror lead, but ultimately I enjoyed his performance. For most of the film, he comes off as unfazed by both supernatural horrors (he scoffs and says that the tales of the haunted honeymoon suite are "hokum") and natural horrors. But his tough exterior eventually breaks down and we see the deep well of pain underneath Ohm's curmudgeonly exterior. This is not unlike Scott's performance in Severance: a man repressing oceans of pain that eventually surge forth.

Hokum is one of my favorite horror combinations: scary AND cozy! I really enjoyed it and can't wait to check it out again.

Grade: A-

***

The Devil Wears Prada 2

I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Mother's Day with my mom and my brother-in-law's mom (who is very much like an aunt to me). While I didn't expect it to be as good as the original film, I have to admit I was deeply disappointed by this movie. 

First of all, it's complete fan service, which is to be expected. Most of the original characters are back, including Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), and Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci). And there are repetitions of scenes and jokes from the original. All of that would be fine if the movie itself was good or had something interesting to say. It does not.

After losing her job at a newspaper, Andy is hired to lead the features department at fashion magazine Runway. Although Miranda Priestly, the ice queen editor-in-chief of Runway, will be Andy's boss once again, Andy was actually hired by Miranda's boss, Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), the owner of Runway's parent company. So Miranda and Andy are in a position to butt heads. Again.

Blah blah blah, there are these "almost" conversations the movie has about climate change and AI and sweatshops and billionaires. But The Devil Wears Prada 2 isn't interested in having these conversations for real. The movie feels completely out of touch both in the sense that we're talking about a magazine here, but also in the girl boss feminism of it all. Miranda and Andy have a conversation where Miranda says, "I just love working...don't you?" NO BITCH. WE DONT DREAM OF LABOR.

Look, it's fine to love your job or whatever, but let's face it: this movie is about wealthy, skinny, cunty people and as a society we're sick of that shit. Or, at least, I'm sick of that shit, unless it's going to genuinely make fun of these bougie shits. The original The Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006 and was the perfect film for its time and I still really love it. This movie, 20 years later, feels like something out of a time capsule and not in a good way. 

Grade: C

***

WALL-E

Believe it or not, I have never seen Pixar's WALL-E before. But now that I have a 4 year old niece, I get a chance to catch up on all the kid's movies I ignored. What a delight WALL-E is! The story of a trash-collecting robot left to endlessly do his mindless tasks on a long-abandoned Earth, only to find love with EVE, a robot sent from somewhere else to scan Earth for signs of life, is a lovely and contemplative one. 

I think most people find the first 30-40 minutes, which are dialogue-free, to be the highlight of the film. When EVE is taken back to her mothership, which turns out to be a giant cruise ship for the descendants of humans who left Earth when it became uninhabitable, and WALL-E follows, the movie turns into a message movie about the dangers of overconsumption. It's the kind of movie people watch now, 20 years later, and are like "Oh my god, it came true!" (similar to Idiocracy). Still, I found the second half of the movie pretty entertaining, even if it wasn't as meditative and pure as the first half.

I'm glad I watched WALL-E. I think it's considered one of the best, if not the best, Pixar films and I wasn't that blown away by it...however, I also wasn't fully watching it since I was being aggressively cuddled by my niece the whole time. 

Grade: B+

***

Passenger

I've given director Andre Ovredal enough chances at this point. The Norwegian filmmaker directed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a movie I gave a rare "D" rating to, as well as The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a movie I turned off halfway through. His latest, Passenger, is the best movie I've seen by him and it's still a bit of a stinker. The premise of the film is excellent: a couple sell their house to start a new "van life", traveling across the United States with a decked out van they sleep in. But after stopping to help the victim of a car accident, an entity latches onto them and begins following and tormenting them. 

This intriguing premise is wasted on a film that is poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly directed. Passenger isn't awful, it's just very meh. The lead actors, Jacob Scipio as Tyler and Lou Llobel as Maddie, are...fine. Melissa Leo at least brings some welcome campiness as a veteran Van Lifer who tries to warn Maddie. But Passenger takes itself too seriously to go full camp mode. 

One thing that annoyed me is that the movie initially treats the entity (the titular "Passenger") as an unknowable evil and has Maddie do research into the lore behind whatever this thing is. However, near the end of the movie, Maddie and Tyler meet up with Melissa Leo's character, Diane, again and she basically explains exactly how to fight the thing. It's just very unsatisfying. And the nature of the Passenger is very Conjuring Universe-esque. 

Feel free to skip this flat, uninteresting film. 

Grade: C

***

Training Day

I saw Antoine Fuqua's Training Day around the time it came out, over 20 years ago. I revisited it on a majestic screen smaller than an 8x11 piece of paper while on a 6 hour flight, sitting next to a woman who refused to put the window screen down and couldn't stop coughing.

What is there to say? It's Training Day. The story of a rookie cop, Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), and a complete psycho of an experienced narcotics officer, Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), who get involved in a number of life-threatening shenanigans on Jake's first day in the narcotics unit.

This is a film of its time. It's copaganda where the Good Cop (Jake) emerges with his morals and ethics in tact after being put through hell by the Bad Cop (Alonzo). Am I out of pocket to say this movie feels...racist? Or, at least, the racial politics of the film are weird. It really leans in to a lot of stereotypes of Black and Hispanic men and women. But also, I'm a white lady from the suburbs who has never been forced to smoke PCP at gunpoint like poor Jake. So what the fuck do I know?

Training Day is an entertaining film with the smiling, evil, psychotic Denzel at its center. It's kind of the perfect movie to watch on a plane since you don't really need to follow the plot of dialogue all that closely. 

Grade: B

Backrooms

Backrooms is so much bigger than the horror movie itself. In order to explain the movie, we need to explore the history of "Backrooms".

The concept of the Backrooms started as an online "creepypasta" (essentially, an internet folktale) where images of empty, abandoned spaces were posted online--initially on 4chan, but eventually on Reddit and other more mainstream social media sites. I personally first heard about "Backrooms" on the forum website Something Awful in a thread titled "Cursed Images". 

Backrooms is a simple concept--liminal spaces, with maybe a hint of nostalgia or familiarity. But also very creepy. The images make you want to explore the spaces but also run away from them. A 4chan user suggested that the way to get to them was to "noclip" out of reality--to jump or fall into another dimension. But once you're there, you can't find your way back out because the Backrooms are labyrinthian. 

In early 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons, only 16 years old at the time, created a web series about the Backrooms that went viral and set the stage for the film. In the series, getting lost in the Backrooms isn't the only danger. There is something living down there as well. 

Now, at 20 years old, Parsons directs this feature-length film starring award-winning actors. To me, whether Backrooms is the perfect film or not (it's not) is besides the point. The fact that a young guy not old enough to drink legally created such a viral phenomenon and then directed a movie that is making more money at the box office than the Mandalorian and Grogu film is an achievement beyond most people's wildest dreams. 

What is even more astonishing is that Kane is good at directing! The directing and set design of Backrooms are the movie's strengths. The film takes place in 1990. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the owner of a furniture store who is also currently living in that store since his wife kicked him out of their house. The only humans Clark has any regular contact with are his employees, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett), as well as his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve).

One night while fiddling with the store's breaker box, Clark sees a light shining through what should be a solid wall in the store's basement. When he goes to put his ear against the wall, he literally falls through it and into what looks like a massive, abandoned office building. He begins exploring and discovers room after room after room--some completely empty, some with random furniture or detritus. There are tiny doors to crawl through and doors on the ceiling. There's also the sense that someone--or something--is following Clark.

Clark tries to explain this to Mary, who understandably is confused and thinks Clark is suffering from alcoholic delusions. Clark then recruits Kat and Bobby to explore the space, bringing a camcorder and rope in case they have to scale a drop. Things go sideways almost immediately.

After Clark leaves a cryptic message for Mary, she goes to the store and sees the outline of tape indicating the "door" to the Backrooms. When she walks through it, she is astonished to see that Clark wasn't lying or delusional. 

This is where the movie became not so great. The film's weak points (in my opinion) are the script and the pacing. The movie tries to explain what the Backrooms are and add a layer of emotional meaning on top. Basically, the Backrooms are memories. Or rather "the space remembering things". This is why everything is just a little wrong--because memories are never crystal clear; they're always a little off and a little faded. But how the Backrooms came to be is never explained (which is a good thing!). 

There is a message layered on top of the mystery which is essentially: we get stuck in the Backrooms when we refuse to change. Clark decides he has never felt more "right" in the Backrooms. Because he doesn't want to change. He doesn't want to consider how he contributed to his divorce or his failed career. He wants to live in faded memories. And being unwilling to escape the "loops" of his life seals Clark's fate.

But we really didn't need this. I would get rid of all the scenes trying to make meaning of the Backrooms for more scenes of actually exploring the Backrooms. I would have preferred a slower build of dread. We have three scenes in the Backrooms (even though each one is lengthy): Clark's initial discovery and explorations; Clark returning with Kat and Bobby; and Mary's discovery. In each of these sequences, more and more is revealed and there are some goosebump-inducing moments, such as when Bobby enters a room, looks up, and sees a hallway running vertically, like some fucked up MC Escher painting. I wanted more of this and less therapy speak.

That said, Backrooms is a very unique horror film with a set design and cinematography that is unlike anything I've seen before. Even the scenes not shot on grainy videotape *feel* very 1990s. And the design of the Backrooms is the stuff of actual nightmares. 

For all its flaws, Backrooms is worth seeing. The film is crushing it at the box office, especially given its modest budget. It's making people want to go to the movies and see it on a big screen. It's always exciting to see a new voice in horror, especially a guy so young. I'm excited to see what he'll do next.

Grade: B+