UPDATE: Bumping this post for the weekend.
I’m seeing a lot of mixed audience reactions from people who have seen Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day,” which had limited screenings yesterday, semi-wide screenings today, and in theaters everywhere tomorrow. I’ll bump this thread up over the weekend when more readers have caught up with it. Currently, the film sits at 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and 75 on Metacritic.
A new Spielberg is always a movie event for cinephiles — the man has given us so many classics these last fifty years. I’ve had readers emailing me that I was too tough on the film in my review, and others who believed I was way too kind: am I firmly planted in the middle of the general consensus? Then again, I’m currently counting the ballots of our annual mid-year critics poll, and “Disclosure Day” is getting a ton of votes. Either this has been a very bad year for movies, or “Disclosure Day” has fervent, passionate defenders (or both).
I plan to see the film again this weekend; maybe it’ll hit me more, but as it stands, my initial view of this film is that it’s impeccably directed, with a handful of wonderful set pieces, but the script is a problem, and the climax just doesn’t work; the final twenty or so minutes are just plain silly. They didn’t hit me the way Spielberg intended it to — he pushes us too hard to have an emotional reaction. Hey, maybe a rewatch will hit me differently, but, yeah, good film, great direction, impeccably acted, and severely overwritten. Now it’s your turn — what are your thoughts on “Disclosure Day”?
I can confirm that Joel Coen’s “Jack of Spades” is based on Frances Frederica Montrésor’s 1901 novel “The Alien: A Story of Middle Age.” It’s a ghost story. A gothic mystery.