DISCLOSURE DAY. When I last wrote or even thought critically about Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans, 2022), I recalled my adolescent resistance to his work, realizing in hindsight that my affinity for snark and edginess (it was the 1990s) had veiled my eyes, or at least inured me, to the integrity and mastery underpinning all of his work. In my middle period as a movie nerd, I eschewed the traditionally popular as simplistic and was reactionary toward earnestness and sentimentality in general, but especially in film art. I was, as we all tend to be, stupid and unworldly, disrespectful of the craft and integrity required to bring one’s emotional life to an inherently populist, collaborative artform. Some things never change, but time and experience have at least allowed me to understand not only Spielberg’s importance as a cultural figure, but also the almost unimaginable level of skill (natural and cultivated) with which he operates. Putting aside my evergreen reverence of irony, if only for a moment, I see that I misconstrued the watchability of the director’s work as ease. Because he invented so much of the cinematic language that forms the lexicon of a generation, it once seemed to me that his craft took the path of least resistance. Spielberg doesn’t show his work on screen, by which I mean that even when appearing to be precious he is anything but. Where so many of his contemporaries and inheritors are desperate for us to notice and admire the rigor or athleticism of their technique, he seems to simply toss off the impossible and move on to the next, leaving us with such an immersive experience that we, as we should, don’t have or take the time to nod knowingly at what he just did there. He is an adherent and practitioner of cinema in its totality, nonpareil; he just happens to use his skills to make work that is easy to like.
Perhaps because the world tends ever more toward entropy and dystopia, the coarse humor and winking nastiness we all so enjoyed in the ’90s heyday of ironic violence and misanthropy now feel dated. Which means we have arrived again at a moment for which Spielberg has always been ready; maybe we just came back home.
Disclosure Day may not be remembered as first-tier work from a first-tier artist, but that’s really a specious semantic distinction because it is very much of a piece with what he has been doing for more than half a century. It is a popcorn movie, to be sure, a big, exciting, broadly accessible entertainment that doesn’t require a cinematic dictionary to be properly enjoyed. But, and this may be the crucial distinction, it is also firmly grounded not only in technique but in a deep-seated, unassailable ethos.
Opening with the sort of back-alley stand-off that immediately reminds of Indy confronting Nazis, Disclosure Day goes on to tell the rollicking, remarkably compact tale of a small group of justice-minded rebels intent on sharing their truth with the world. At the center of the story is reformed blackhat hacker Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), on the run with his beloved, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), from a shadowy non-government covert agency with a backpack of beyond-sensitive intelligence. Guided from afar by avuncular handler Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), Kellner finds himself on the run not only from the murderous bad guys but toward an unwitting ally. She, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weatherperson currently treading water at a Kansas City affiliate, has been suddenly and unnervingly bestowed with a sort of second sight enabling her to know the inmost truths and lived experiences of other people.
While Disclosure Day (scripted by the great David Koepp) occasionally succumbs to talkiness, it is punctuated with such forceful set pieces and (perhaps misplaced, time will tell) faith in humanity’s frequently discounted optimism that the lulls are easily forgiven. It is full-on Spielberg: classic and modern at once, fresh and energetic and consummately watchable in that ineffable, inimitable but so frequently attempted way that has become an intrinsic part of all or our movie education. PG13. 145M. MINOR.
THE FURIOUS. Just in brief, I’ll say that fight movies are often either underwritten or overburdened with plot. While this might tend a bit toward the former, it can easily be forgiven because it is the most audaciously choreographed, staged and photographed martial arts picture to make it into wide release in many years.
Pitted against obvious bad guys (child traffickers), handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) and investigator Navin (Joe Taslim) become allies in the search for Wang’s daughter and Navin’s disappeared journalist wife. Which means, of course, many, many, many fights the likes of which most of us have never seen.
Directed by Kenji Tanigaki, The Furious acknowledges the legacy of pan-Asian martial arts cinema to which it owes its existence while forging ahead to invent new, seemingly impossible ways to show us close-quarters combat. 113M. BROADWAY.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Miranda’s Rescue Under Scrutiny, Part 1.