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“Disclosure Day.”

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

"Disclosure Day" " is a throwback to an earlier era of summer blockbusters.

It’s been nearly four years since we’ve had a new Steven Spielberg picture—an unusually long, but understandable, wait. Spielberg, though as nimble an entertainer as we’ve got, will turn eighty this December, and the halcyon overachieving years of “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List” (1993), “Minority Report” and “Catch Me If You Can” (2002), and “War of the Worlds” and “Munich” (2005) seem far behind him. His most recent feature, “The Fabelmans” (2022), was the kind of piercingly confessional work that might have put a lesser filmmaker out to pasture (not that a lesser filmmaker could have made “The Fabelmans”). After digging deep into his formative memories—chief among them his childhood surrender to the movies, which would define him, and which he would forever redefine—where, exactly, could Spielberg go next?

The opening scenes of his new blockbuster, “Disclosure Day,” offer up a hilarious answer: a pro-wrestling match, of course, for a rejuvenating dose of adrenaline. It’s a more pummelling kind of Spielberg spectacle than we’re used to, and also a canny diversion; in the bleachers, a far more consequential clash of wills is secretly playing out. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a sharp-witted cybersecurity expert, plans to blow the whistle on the sinister non-government agency WARDEX, short for Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction. His former boss, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), is determined to stop him from exposing the group’s secrets: namely, that alien lifeforms exist, and that the agency has concealed evidence of their visits for decades.