Steven Spielberg is seventy-nine years old, and he just made the movie where the government finally stops lying about aliens. Disclosure Day caps the loose trilogy he started with Close Encounters and E.T. — private awe, then childhood friendship, and now a global broadcast that yanks the curtain back on all of it. This month the Film Board gathers to toss about whether the old master still has the magic.
Full spoilers, of course. The panel digs into Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor as the searching heart of the thing, Colin Firth's body-hopping menace, the cosmic-FaceTime dinner table, a train sequence that actually pays off its punchline, and a panic attack they call of the most accurate they’ve ever seen on screen. They argue the device nobody understands (Duraflame theory included), the news-station climax, and a big-swing ending that stops cold at the moment of disclosure and whispers a single word.
Then the larger brawl: whether a 79-year-old's plea for empathy and transparency lands in a cultural moment where the same disclosure could just as easily become a hunting license.
The Film Board is a monthly deep-dive on new releases, part of The Next Reel family of film podcasts.
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Over on Make Me A Nerd…
Disclosure Day is the back half of a Spielberg conversation Steve already started. Over on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy hands him the mic for Close Encounters of the Third Kind — one of his top five films of all time — and gets the full package: curiosity, obsession, government lies, blinking lights, and questionable parenting. It's the hunger for connection that Disclosure Day spends fifty years catching up to. Mandy arrives late to the party, but by the end she understands exactly why this movie meant — and still means — so much. If you want the origin point of every instinct this new one is paying off, that's the room.
Make Me A Nerd • Close Encounters with Steve Sarmento
Over on The Next Reel…
Pete Wright and Andy Nelson took Close Encounters apart for the Next Reel's Original Sci-Fi series — the three existing cuts of the film, what's different, why the changes were made, and which to watch — plus an older-and-wiser reckoning with how the parenting of both Roy and Gillian now feels incredibly poor. The private-awe-versus-government-stonewall DNA that Disclosure Day scales up to a global broadcast starts right here.
The Next Reel • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
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