YNOT at the Movies

Boaz spends the first half of writer-director Moshe Rosenthal's sophomore feature "Tell Me Everything" (עצמאות | Israel/France/UK 2026 | in Hebrew | 109 min.) learning a secret, and the second half learning what to do with it. Rosenthal treats those as two different movies, one about discovery and one about repair, and the film is stronger for keeping them separate rather than rushing Boaz toward some tidy understanding.

It's 1987 in Tel Aviv, and Boaz (Yair Mazor) is a scrawny kid a few months out from his bar mitzvah, a coming of age ritual in Judaism. He is closer to his mother Bella (Keren Tzur), a beautician, than to his father Meir (Assi Cohen), a cab driver who also runs a furniture store. Boaz shares a room with his two older sisters, and the whole apartment hums with 80s hits off a boombox, the era's big hair, and shoulder pads. The film spends time letting that household feel warm before it takes the warmth apart. When Boaz stumbles onto the truth about his father, with AIDS already a distant but terrifying headline on the evening news, he tells his family what he saw, and the fallout pushes Meir out of his life entirely.

The back half jumps to 1996, when Boaz (Ido Tako) is twenty-one. He's been admitted to university in Jerusalem but is still sleeping in his mother's living room, working at a gas station that isn't enough to get him out. He carries longing, resentment, guilt, and regret for the father he hasn't seen since his bar mitzvah, all of it tangled together. It's heartbreaking to watch him try to sort through it without much help from anyone around him.

Rosenthal and his production and costume teams recreate the family's world in fine detail, the apartment, the clothes, even the sidewalks outside, the texture of a working-class Tel Aviv household in the late '80s. The move to '90s is handled with the same care, tracking how both Boaz's own feelings and the culture's attitude toward gay people have shifted with the years.

Mazor is the film's real discovery. Before the truth about his father comes out, this Boaz plainly admires the man, and it's in the boy's inquisitive stares, watching, working things out, that the film locates a child's mind still catching up to what's in front of it. Tako, picking up the role as the character enters his twenties, plays that tangle of longing, resentment, guilt, and regret without ever resolving it into something simpler than it is.

A few too many of the second half's turns depend on Boaz being in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, and the coincidences start to show through the emotional groundwork Rosenthal has otherwise laid so carefully. It doesn't undo the film, but it does mean the raw feeling on screen is doing more of the persuading than the story is.

"Tell Me Everything" marks Rosenthal's second time opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), following "Karaoke" (2022) at SFJFF42. This year's edition of SFJFF, the 46th, is the festival's largest yet, with 65 films from 17 countries and a record eight world premieres. The festival closes Saturday, August 1, at the Piedmont Theatre with the documentary "We Met at Grossinger's" (2025) and the next day it screens this year's winners for the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award, Best First Feature Award, and Audience Awards for documentary and narrative.

"Tell Me Everything" opens the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on July 16, at the Herbst Theatre, with a second Bay Area screening July 29 at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland.

Renowned write-director Hirokazu Koreeda's new film "Sheep in the Box" (箱の中の羊 | Japan 2026 | in Japanese | 126 min.) has many ingredients of his best work: a grieving family, a watchful child, an unresolved wound. What it doesn't have is the effort to pick a direction and follow it.

Koreeda has covered this emotional territory before, and covered it better. "After Life" (1998) turned death into a philosophical puzzle box. "Still Walking" (2008) and "Shoplifters" (2018) found the drama inside ordinary family routines. "Nobody Knows" (2004) and "Monster" (2023) both trusted children to carry the story itself. A film about android replacements for the dead has also already been made brilliantly, in Kogonada's "After Yang" (2021). "Sheep in the Box" "Sheep in the Box" seems to want to be all of these films at once, touching on grief, family, childhood friendship, and artificial intelligence in turn, but it never settles into any one of them long enough to say something new.

Two years after losing their young son Kakeru, architect Otone Komoto (Haruka Ayase) and her husband Kensuke Komoto (Daigo Yamamoto), a carpenter, bring a humanoid modeled on their dead Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki) into their home. The company that built the humanoid rents these replacements out to bereaved families. The robot looks, moves, and talks exactly like Kakeru, and Otone welcomes him readily while Kensuke resists. His presence starts to bring back some sense of the old time in the house, even if Kensuke's early resentment makes clear that nothing about this is actually normal. Watching that dynamic shift between the humanoid and the parents is the most interesting thing in the film, but it also drags up wounds and regrets neither parent has dealt with.

The director has said the film grew out of news stories about Chinese companies using generative AI to revive the dead, and about a Japanese broadcast that used similar technology to bring back a deceased singer for a new performance. He's drawn the title from the novel "The Little Prince," using it as a way of asking whether something invisible, such as a soul, survives inside a machine built to look like a lost child. But the film raises that question and then declines to follow through on it.

The future depicted in the film doesn't extend past the humanoid himself. Everything else, the houses, the offices, the TV news reports about children going missing, looks like the present. That narrowness might have worked if the film used its restraint to dig into the parents' grief instead, but it hedges there too, and the result is a story with likeable people in an intriguing situation that never risks going anywhere uncomfortable.

Ayase plays Otone's need to believe with real tenderness, and Yamamoto, better known in Japan as a comedian than an actor, finds a wary, unshowy resistance in Kensuke that suits the character's slower path toward accepting the robot. The film's real discovery is Rimu Kuwaki, making his screen debut as Kakeru's humanoid after being chosen out of two hundred children who auditioned. Koreeda has always had a gift for directing kids, and he gets something genuinely eerie and touching out of Kuwaki, who has to play warmth and a faint, unplaceable wrongness in the same scene.

As in most of Koreeda's films, there's no real villain here, aside from the implied threat of child abductors mentioned on the news. He'd rather make you feel for everyone in the frame than give you someone to root against, and that instinct still works even when the larger story doesn't.

It's frustrating to watch this film from a director who's usually so sure-footed, but even for this lesser Koreeda film, it has more feeling in it than most, and there's enough tenderness and craft here to make it worth seeing, especially for the director's longtime admirers.

"Sheep in the Box" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, July 31, 2026.

Director Christopher Nolan spent sixteen years chasing an all-IMAX feature, and he finally made "The Odyssey" (UK/USA 2026 | 172 min.). Like the incredible journey told in the film, the film itself is incredible to watch in the 70mm format on IMAX, a genuine spectacle, shot across six countries (Morocco, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Scotland, and the U.S.) with real ships and thousands of extras on a burning set.

The film adapts Homer's ancient Greek epic poem, one of the foundational texts of Western literature, believed to have been composed around the 8th century BCE. It follows Odysseus (Matt Damon), king of Ithaca, in the years after the Trojan War, as he tries to sail home and is instead dragged through a series of hostile gods, monsters, and supernatural islands. The Trojan War itself was sparked when a young Trojan man took Helen (Lupita Nyong'o), queen of Sparta, from her husband Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and brought her back to Troy.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus's wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off a palace full of suitors pressuring her to remarry, led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), while their son Telemachus (Tom Holland) comes of age searching for any word that his father is still alive. After a few years, Odysseus defies the gods and endures tremendous ordeals to complete the journey back home.

The filmmaking is exceptional. Whether it's the massed torchlight of the sack of Troy or the real ocean crossings on a genuine Norwegian longship, Nolan's commitment to shooting practically shows up on screen in a way visual effects alone couldn't fake. Nolan shot the entire film with IMAX film cameras, a first for a fiction feature, using a newly engineered camera housing (nicknamed "the blimp," later renamed The Keighley) that finally solved the decades-old problem of the camera being too loud to record dialogue on set. You feel that scale in every frame.

The performances are top notch throughout. Lupita Nyong'o takes on a dual role as both Helen and her twin sister Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae, finding distinct notes in two women trapped in very different marriages. Matt Damon never smiles once during the entire movie. He plays a sad warrior, a man worn down by ten years of war before the movie even gives him room to grieve it.

However, the mystery might be a bit hard to understand, particularly what the monsters and gods actually are and why they're attacking the warriors. Viewers unfamiliar with Homer's book may find it challenging to keep up with figures like the witch Circe (Samantha Morton), the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), and the goddess Athena (Zendaya), who repeatedly intervenes on Odysseus's behalf, without much scaffolding for who they are or what they want.

You can also mirror the war in the movie with reality here, and it resonates. The invasion and conquest at the heart of the story lives on in thousands of years of human history, even though this particular story isn't quite real Greek history to begin with. That tension between myth and modern recognition is what makes the siege of Troy land as more than spectacle.

Homer's poem took generations of oral storytellers to become myth. Nolan's version needed six countries, a 300-pound camera, and a cast and crew willing to row real oars and hike real hillsides to make it real. Both were worth it.

"The Odyssey" opens in theaters on Friday, July 17, 2026.

A live-action remake that spends most of its runtime rendered in computer graphics is not a live-action remake. It's a cartoon with a bigger budget and a straighter face, and that contradiction sits at the center of everything wrong with "Moana" (USA 2026 | 115 min.).

The story hasn't changed. Moana (Catherine Laga'aia), the future chief of the island of Motunui, defies her father's warnings and sails past the reef with the disgraced demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to return a stolen heart to the mother island Te Fiti and lift a curse strangling her people's home. It's a clean adventure structure, one that worked well in 2016's animated film. This version treats that structure as a formality to clear before the visual effects team takes over.

And the CGI takes over constantly. Heihei the rooster, Te Kā the lava demon, entire ocean sequences: all obviously generated, none of it earning the promise the film's marketing keeps making. If the plan was always to animate most of the movie, the question is why bother restaging it as live-action at all.

The human performances don't pick up the slack. Catherine Laga'aia has been billed as a discovery, and there are flickers of screen presence in her early scenes on Motunui, but once the voyage starts she and Dwayne Johnson both go flat, running through beats rather than feeling them. Rena Owen's Gramma Tala should be the emotional hinge of the whole film and instead reads like she wandered in from a different, warmer cut. This is a story that only works if you're concerned for a teenager alone on the open ocean, and none of the performances make you feel it.

The direction doesn't help. Scenes cut before they take a foot hold, edited with the nervous energy of a slideshow that doesn't trust any single image to hold attention. It's an odd choice for a story about slowing down long enough to listen to an ocean, a grandmother, an ancestor.

The songs don't help either. None of the new material locks into a hook, and the film seems to lose its nerve about being a musical partway through, cutting between numbers and straight dialogue like it isn't sure which movie it's making. A musical that keeps second-guessing whether it's a musical isn't going to convince anyone else either.

Even smaller logic gaps stop mattering to the filmmakers. Moana and Maui split half a banana at one point and that's the only meal either of them is shown eating across a multi-day open-ocean journey. It's a nothing detail on its own, but it's symptomatic: nobody making this movie seems especially interested in whether any of it holds together, because the CGI spectacle is doing all the work they think they need.

The costuming and production design are the one place the film actually delivers, and it's a shame that work is stuck inside a story that doesn't care about its own details. Everything else feels like a duplication of the 2016 animated film with a bigger budget and less nerve, a remake that can't decide whether it wants to exist as its own thing or just resell you the original with a straighter face.

"Moana" opens in theaters on Friday, July 10, 2026.

The little yellow henchmen have never been funnier than when they mess up their villainous masters' tasks in ridiculous ways in the first half of "Minions & Monsters" (USA 2026 | 90 min.), and the movie shines brightest when it's paying tribute to cinema history. This delightfully charming new chapter feels breezy and fun, delivering more laughs than the franchise has managed in a long time.

This new film sends a tribe of Minions on the same doomed errand that has always defined the species: find the most evil boss imaginable and serve him until everything falls apart. The list is quite long: a cyclops, a mummy, a pirate, an ancient ruler, and a sorcerer. Of course, every gig has ended in catastrophe. It's all narrated in cheerful retrospect by a museum guide named Olivia (voiced by Allison Janney), who claims this is all true and clearly loves how insane that sounds.

This time, the story follows four new characters, all voiced by the film's director Pierre Coffin: Dick, the self-proclaimed leader who treats the evil boss hunt like a sacred calling, and the more wayward trio of James, Henry and Ed. Their search lands them in 1920s Hollywood, where they crash a film set run by Max (voiced by Christoph Waltz), who assumes for a moment that his career just went up in flames.

Instead, the studio's fat bosses (both voiced by Jeff Bridges) spot star power in the Minions. Silent film rewards exactly what these creatures already do best: big feelings, bigger gestures, zero need for a script. The Minions instantly become the unlikeliest movie stars in Hollywood. Then the talking pictures arrive, and the same instincts that made them famous suddenly can't keep them employed. The town that adored them moves on quickly.

None of that backstory matters as much as how it actually feels to watch. The stretch built around the tribe's doomed boss search is the loosest, silliest, and funniest filmmaking these characters have gotten in years. What it taps into is close to the heart: the specific, gleeful chaos of being a kid who knows exactly how much trouble they're about to cause and does it anyway.

This is also where the film is most alive, in its love letter to cinema history. The silent comedy stretches play like the work of a scholar who studied the deadpan precision of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin's physical comedy, and it shows the deepest affection for early Hollywood.

Whether they've got one eye or two, all the Minions are irresistibly cute. Director Pierre Coffin's gibberish baby voice is both amusing and adorable. It sounds as if it's speaking many languages at once, but more often sounds suspiciously like Italian, and even throwing in Mandarin's "thank you" for fun. It comes out as pure, undeniable mischief rather than noise for its own sake.

The trouble starts once the studio moves on and James refuses to. He has fallen hard for moviemaking, and rather than let it go, he talks Henry and Ed into helping him build a monster picture out of his own sketchbook, working from an old boss's stolen spell book.

Here is where the film starts losing the energy that made it funny and adorable. Once the story commits fully to monster territory, the Minions stop being gleeful screwups and start being heroes with a planet to save, and a movie that had been running on mischief suddenly needs its characters to behave and save the world. The chaos gets tidier. The jokes get safer.

None of it collapses, but the air noticeably leaves the room. It doesn't help that the film keeps cutting away from James, Henry and Ed's monster movie to check in on Dick's half of the tribe, who stumble onto Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a stiff, monotone robot they mistake for their next boss, a character who should have been left out of the movie entirely. Every cut back to it pulls focus from the scrappier, funnier story the Minions are working so hard to tell. It feels like a detour that was allowed to compete with the main event instead of supporting it.

However, that is not enough to sink the experience. Even with a back half that loses its nerve, this is generous, good-natured entertainment built with real craft and obvious affection for movie history, and it never stops being fun to look at. With the heat outside and the depressing news feed around the world, this movie makes the perfect escape.

"Minions & Monsters" opens in theaters on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.

Oscar Wilde kicks things off; Olivia Wilde brings it home. "The Invite" (USA 2026 | 107 min.) opens with a line from the legendary master of wit:

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

Then, for the remaining of its running time, the movie tries to prove him right, with plenty of laughs, deliciously awkward moments, and a kind of raw honesty many comedies are too scared to touch.

Joe (Seth Rogen) is a former indie musician who now teaches for a steady paycheck. His wife, Angela (Olivia Wilde), decides to invite their upstairs neighbors over, without bothering to warn him. The neighbors are the breezy confident and easy charming Hawk (Edward Norton) and his therapist partner Piña (Penélope Cruz). They show up like philosophical provocateurs instead of casual neighbors. The rest of the evening is nothing like everyone has expected it to be.

What keeps the film interesting is how fluidly the dynamics shift among these four. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from writer-director Cesc Gay's "The People Upstairs" (Sentimental | Spain 2020), the film has an earned, unforced rapport at its center that came out of an intensive pre-shoot workshop between director and cast. The alliances in the apartment change so much that feel both absurd and completely true to life. By the end, the lines between therapist and patient, guest and host, liberated and repressed, have blurred beyond recovery.

All four leads are terrific with perfect timing. Seth Rogen might be both the funniest and saddest he's ever been; Joe's dry humor turns heartbreaking before you can even spot the shift. Olivia Wilde is revelatory as the wounded Angela, trying desperately to steer an evening she has already lost control of. Edward Norton brings heart to a character who, let's be honest, might not even deserve it. And Penélope Cruz? She's perhaps the most purely pleasurable to watch: a therapist who deploys candor as a weapon and warmth as a trap.

The film's jokes are grown-up in the best way—sharp, specific, unflattering, and pointed straight at anyone who's ever bargained with themselves in marriage. Some jokes sting, and that sting feels uncomfortably familiar. The cringe and the laugh are the same reflex here.

The movie takes place in a San Francisco apartment, and the city appears just long enough at the opening to remind you how much it might have given the film, the fog, the hills, and the light. If you were lucky enough to catch it at the Castro Theatre during the opening night at the 69th SFFILM Festival, you might well have wished the homecoming had more of the City in it. The apartment, though, is gorgeous, all soft blues and greens against fancy ceilings and moldings. However, that's more like a theater stage setting, not really for cinema.

Still, the film shows its intelligence and mostly delivers its laughs, and if it sacrifices San Francisco for a living room, what happens in that living room turns out to be worth the trade. This is the adult comedy the summer needed.

"The Invite" opens in theaters on Friday, July 2, 2026.

The DC machine keeps churning out movies, and "Supergirl" (USA 2026 | 107 min.) is the latest result: loud, busy, and somehow, surprisingly forgettable.

Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), Superman's cousin and one of Krypton's few survivors, just drifts through the galaxy until Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), a ruthless scavenger, goes after the one thing she cares about: her dog, Krypto. That forces Kara into action, tying her fate to Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a thirteen-year-old bent on avenging her murdered family. During the course, bounty hunter biker Lobo (Jason Momoa) crashes in to throw even more chaos into the mix.

Sure, the movie has its highlights. There's one sequence—a cheap, battered shuttle with an oddball cast of aliens chain-smoking, drooling, or even knitting—that actually nails some real comedy. For a moment, it feels like the movie wants to have fun. When the story brings you to Barenton, a volcanic planet shot in Iceland, the scenery actually feels epic, like someone finally realized a superhero movie in space should look wild and strange.

But the story itself? It never really hits home. You get shuttled from planet to planet, and when it's over, nothing sticks. The action scenes don't give much satisfaction. Kara's powers seem to shift on a whim; sometimes she mows down enemies with heat vision, sometimes she almost gets beaten flat and then bounces back good as new, no explanation, nothing. The rules feel shaky, so it's hard to care what happens.

Krem spends his time smashing and pillaging, locking girls in cages, that doesn't keep Ruthye away from confronting him even though she barely makes any impact. Ruthye is supposed to push Kara to grow, but she ends up pretty much a background prop, shouting for justice or waiting to be rescued.

There's at least some ambition in the film's visuals. Director Craig Gillespie and cinematographer Rob Hardy go all in on neon colors, and the worlds actually have personality. Still, a lot of the alien creatures just end up looking messy or odd instead of interesting. Milly Alcock, though, is doing the work. She holds the movie's tonal lurches together well enough, but her Supergirl deserved a sharper script and a real sense of purpose.

"Supergirl" opens in theaters on Friday, June 26, 2026.

There's something self-defeating about a movie that asks you to put down your screens by showing you a screen, perhaps bigger. Thirty-one years after Andrew Stanton and company helped invent the modern animated blockbuster, "Toy Story 5" (USA 2026 | 102 min.) comes with something worth fighting for. It fights for that something as unconvincingly as possible.

The setup is savvy enough. Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and the rest of the gang belong to Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), an 8-year-old who inherited them from their original owner Andy, now years into college. Bonnie's a sweet kid, but a struggling one: her peers have traded playtime for screen time, and the arrival of Lilypad (Greta Lee), a frog-shaped smart tablet with her own agenda for helping Bonnie connect with friends, upends the toy ecosystem of her bedroom. The premise has real potential. The film squanders it.

This film doesn't trust that potential enough to make a real argument for the toys' relevance. Instead, it offers a deeply unconvincing one: screens are bad because they'll get you bullied. That's the thesis. Not that imaginative play fosters creativity, not that physical toys build something in a child that a tablet simply can't. Just go online and bad things happen. For a franchise that once made moviegoers weep over a cowboy doll staring at the stars, it's a staggering drop in emotional and intellectual ambition.

What fills the gap is noise and franchise muscle, and neither does much to make the characters stick. Hanks and Allen are recognizable voices, but the film gives them so little to chew on that they function less as characters than as brand mascots. The supporting ensemble, new and returning alike, blurs together into a pleasant, forgettable hum. Conan O'Brien's Smarty Pants, a wisecracking toilet-training toy, lands a few real laughs before fading into the crowd. Pixar leans hard on accumulated affection here, banking on the audience to supply the emotion the film itself never builds. The film tries to diagnose a cultural problem, then offers a shrug where a solution should be.

The meta-irony cuts deepest: watching "Toy Story 5" is not the same thing as playing with toys. It never was. The earlier films understood this; their emotional power came from how they made you feel about childhood, not from lecturing you to have one. This fifth sequel confuses the two, producing a movie that will satisfy the very young, for whom the characters alone are enough, and franchise devotees who will find comfort in familiar names. Everyone else will sense the hollowness beneath the noise.

"Toy Story 5" opens in theaters on Friday, June 19, 2026.

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski sets out to strip the nobility from Robin Hood with "The Death of Robin Hood" (USA 2026 | 123 min.), and replace it with honest medieval brutality. He's done that, and almost nothing else.

The film sets the story of the outlaw in the Celtic fringe of 1247 A.D. Robin (Hugh Jackman) appears looking worse than anyone sleeping rough on a city street today, draped in layers of sodden fur and barely distinguishable from the mud he crawls through. He is, by design, a feral, self-mythologizing killer waiting for a death that's long overdue. After being pulled back into violence by his old partner Little John (Bill Skarsgård), Robin winds up gravely wounded at a hillside priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a prioress with her own obscured past. Also living at the priory is the Leper (Murray Bartlett), another broken man surviving outside of society, who becomes Robin's most uncomfortable companion: part confessor, part provocateur, forcing Robin to look at himself without the mythology.

The Northern Irish locations are breathtaking in their ancient desolation, all rolling hills and rock-face under vast grey skies. Cinematographer Pat Scola shoots on celluloid and the landscape earns every foot of film. The fog, though, almost never lifts, literally or figuratively, and the film mistakes this shroud for atmosphere. Director Michael Sarnoski parks the camera in the murk and waits for profundity to arrive.

It mostly doesn't. The accent work across the ensemble is so thickly regional that key scenes become auditory puzzles rather than dramatic ones. The storytelling compounds the problem. For example, the bloodletting sequences between Brigid and Robin, drawn from the medieval ballads that inspired the film, might be meant to carry spiritual weight, but what exactly Brigid is doing to Robin's arm and why is never made legible enough to bear it.

The violence in the opening act is deliberately sloppy and ugly, distinguished from period-film spectacle. It also comes in waves that are harrowing to sit through and largely disconnected from any emotional stakes we've been given reason to feel. When Robin's death comes, it doesn't feel as earned salvation but as a formality the film was always going to observe regardless of whether we cared.

Hugh Jackman commits fully and there are flashes of something raw in the performance. Jodie Comer brings an otherworldly stillness to Brigid, a woman with a traumatic history the film gestures at without ever revealing. Murray Bartlett plays the Leper almost entirely through layers of bandages. The film hints that the true identity of the Leper has roots in the original Robin Hood ballads, but it is still written more as a vessel for grace than as a person.

However, Jim Ghedi's folk score is the film's most distinctive contribution: raw, ancient in feeling, and dark without overdoing it.

This is a serious film with serious intentions. It's also a difficult, confusing, and joyless experience that offers landscapes worth seeing and almost nothing worth feeling.

"The Death of Robin Hood" opens in theaters on Friday, June 19, 2026.

The government, "Disclosure Day" (USA 2026 | 145 min.) would like us to believe, has spent decades hiding the truth about alien life from the rest of us. The conspiracy is vast, the cover-up meticulous, and the stakes nothing short of civilization-altering. Director Steven Spielberg makes all of this feel genuinely urgent for a good stretch of its running time, and the craft on display is never less than formidable. This is a film built with the assurance of a director who knows how to hold an audience. It just can't keep the secret of its own shortcomings.

The film begins as a mystery worth pursuing. Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City television meteorologist, and Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity expert for WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a shadowy military agency guarding classified evidence of alien visitation dating back to Roswell of 1947, each carry fragments of a past they cannot fully access or explain. David Koepp's screenplay doles out its clues with patience, and the intrigue holds for longer than you might expect.

Then the film becomes a chase picture. Once Margaret and Daniel go on the run from the authority led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the film shifts into a fairly conventional government-pursues-whistleblower thriller, complete with car chases, close calls, and narrow escapes. The picture has its exciting stretches: a sustained sequence involving a freight train and the two leads is a genuine piece of old-fashioned Spielbergian engineering.

But the central prop gives the story trouble. "The device," an artifact of recovered alien technology that different characters use in different ways, is a compelling idea on paper. In practice, what it can and cannot do keeps changing, functioning as a mind-control weapon in one scene and a portal to suppressed memory in another, shifting to whatever the plot requires at a given moment. No clear internal logic governs it, and the confusion compounds through the third act.

The climax is where the picture runs out of breath. The eventual disclosure of world-changing evidence, broadcast from a television news studio to a global audience, should arrive with the accumulated effort of all the running and chasing that preceded it. It does not. The staging is oddly perfunctory, the reaction oddly muted, and the scene raises more doubts about plausibility than it resolves. All that pursuit, to arrive here?

That craft is not in question. Production designer Adam Stockhausen's war room headquarters is genuinely imposing. John Williams' score holds back with unusual restraint. Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor give more than the script asks for.

This film is Steven Spielberg operating at full technical capacity on a story that doesn't quite hold together at its foundation. The opening mystery is real. So is the disappointment when the film cannot sustain it.

"Disclosure Day" opens in theaters on Friday, June 12, 2026.