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.
What Steven Spielberg Taught Me About Fear, Catharsis, and Being Human
Hollywood is struggling, but Spielberg insists that the big screen is still the best place to work out our collective dreams, joys and sorrows.
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.
Steven Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Turns Autofiction Into Thrilling Sci-Fi
The Hollywood maestro’s latest is filled with excitement and sentimentality.
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.
AM I? | A Documentary About AI Consciousness
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
Hypernormalisation | Full Documentary | Adam Curtis
The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing
Is “frame architecture” our escape route from the dogma trap of endless culture wars?
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.
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.
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
The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here | Compact
Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror.
How are we writing the future of humanity?
Consciousness spinning
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.
First trailer released for western starring AI version of Val Kilmer
Footage of As Deep As the Grave screened in the US, featuring an authorised visual deepfake of the actor who died in 2025
