Spielberg Chronicles

The Speculative Empathy & Radical Hope of Disclosure Day

For most of Spielberg’s career, science fiction has been the mechanism through which he learns and teaches empathy. But in Disclosure Day, empathy itself is the speculative leap

No Substitute for the Soul: 25 years of Steven Spielberg’s emotional sci-fi A.I. Artificial Intelligence • Journal

To mark 25 years of Steven Spielberg’s soulful sci-fi A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Robert Daniels looks back on the imaginative outlier in Hollywood, and what it can teach us about Earth today.

Twilight of the Spielberg Image

Steven Spielberg's career wrestles with the power and meaning of image-making, and his sci-fi "Disclosure Day" makes this its very subject.

Stephen Spielberg’s Reckless, Audacious “Disclosure Day”

“Disclosure Day,” a tale of aliens on Earth and the coverup of their presence, starring Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, is a catalogue of Steven Spielberg’s obsessions, and a deeply personal vision.

Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Turns Autofiction Into Thrilling Sci-Fi

The Hollywood maestro’s latest is filled with excitement and sentimentality.

Steven Spielberg Is Still Searching for Truth

With ‘Disclosure Day,’ the master director continues to understand the power of revelation, even if he doesn’t have much to disclose this time around

An auteurist’s delight: ‘Disclosure Day’

A film assembled from recognizable spare parts, Disclosure Day has more craft than most big budget American films. The 79-year-old Steven Spielberg’s virtuosity is neither humble nor conceale…

Disclosure Day

Across the films of Steven Spielberg, aliens have frequently been a vehicle to explore religiosity from a secular perspective. Institutions and dogma are elided in favor of dramatizing the ecstatic feeling of believing in something far beyond one�s station, and having that faith rewarded.

Spielberg’s ‘A.I.’ Divided Critics, but It’s the Ultimate Coming-of-Age Story 20 Years Later

Movies don't change, we do. And where you are in life may affect how you receive the heartbreaking vision of this film.

Refugees and Searchers Go to the Movies – First of the Month

Spielberg lets the screen go black for about five seconds. The communal experience of film-going then becomes a shared nightmare. With the screen unlit, the emergency lights in the theater are the only source of illumination. If you jump (as I did), you fear for a moment that the movie has stopped—the reel fallen off its plate, the fantasy interrupted by unfunny, drop-dead reality. “Are we still alive?” whispered by Farrier’s daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is an inquiry that invokes our own doubts about our safety, our capacity to dream, our possible awakening to dire reality. It recalls how many people felt after 9/11. Are we dreaming? Are we still alive? Bringing everyday experience and existential contemplation together so forcefully, Spielberg joins the ranks of the most audacious avant-garde filmmakers: He turns the popcorn movie experience into a consideration of the abyss.

‘Jaws’ Is the Perfect Blockbuster, Saying Nothing yet Signifying Everything

The beauty of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic is that you can choose how to watch it: as a summery, shark-bitten thriller or as an allegory about the failed leadership of institutions

The Raider of a Lost Art

Over 30 actors, filmmakers, and close friends recount how Steven Spielberg infiltrated Hollywood and helped the Movie Brats take over.