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Like a shark hunter who has lost track of the shark, or an adventurer unable to locate the Ark of the Covenant, Steven Spielberg has been drifting for the better part of the decade. In recent years, Spielberg has seemed far removed from the glories of Jaws (1975) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), to say nothing of what I consider his masterpiece, the impeccably rendered, intimately scaled World War II drama, Empire of the Sun (1987). The director’s skeptics each mark the start of his decline in their own way, but his four most recent films seem a logical place to start: The Post (2017) was a particularly lame example of legacy media cheerleading, while Ready Player One (2018) represented a devastating concession to the most pernicious forces in modern movies, including CGI, video games, and pop culture nostalgia. More recently, Spielberg’s version of West Side Story (2021) was defiantly unnecessary, and his admittedly skillful autobiographical saga, The Fabelmans (2022), was a souffle of boyhood anecdotes. Perhaps one reason why his newest release, the extraterrestrial epic Disclosure Day, opened to such robust box-office returns is that it promised a certain retrenching from its director. Enthusiasts of Spielberg’s previous alien-focused films, especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), cannot be faulted for assuming their maker would produce a fresh set of beatific visions: heavenly images of friendly neighbors seeking fellowship with lonely Earthlings. Disclosure Day provides this — and, happily, something more. To be sure, the movie comes loaded with obligatory sentiment about the inexhaustible goodness of aliens, which Spielberg, his terrifying 2005 version of War of the Worlds notwithstanding, takes as an article of faith. The aliens are so kindly that they first approach humans by appearing in the guise of friendly forest creatures, such as deer or foxes — creatures, incidentally, that are not always so friendly in real life but are unambiguously so here. We never get to know a specific alien in this film the way we became best buds with E.T., but taken as a species, there can be no doubt that, to quote the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, they come in peace. Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor star in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. (Niko Tavernise/Universal Pictures) Yet if Disclosure Day were simply a restatement of Spielberg’s fervent hopes for human-alien contact, it would be nothing more than a reminder of his old movies — a welcome reminder, in light of The Post and such, but alarmingly close to pastiche. After all, there are only so many angles from which to film a UFO, or, as the kids say nowadays, a UAP. Happily, Spielberg has something stranger — and scarier — in mind. As scripted by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, Disclosure Day presents nothing less than a deep state committed, by any means necessary, to the permanent concealment of evidence of alien contact. This task has fallen to a vastly powerful, apparently unregulated government-adjacent group known as Wardex. Social media feeds are scrutinized in banks of monitors for any sign that the secret knowledge has spilled out, while Edward Snowden-like leakers — notably, our hero Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) — are subject to threats, intimidation, and worse. The movie even cooks up a juicy villain at the center of the operation, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), whose clipped, British-accented English and well-groomed beard conceal the maniacal degrees to which he will go to keep E.T.’s cousins hidden from view.  There follows a hectic but involving variation on the “paranoid conspiracy” movies popular during Spielberg’s heyday (but never made by Spielberg himself), including The Conversation (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Daniel, a rogue government worker who believes his civic duty compels disclosure, is contrasted with Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a perky, upwardly mobile local TV meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri, whose unaccountable fluency in Russian, newfound habit of vocalizing using clucking sounds, and intermittent capacity for mind-reading are clues that aliens might have once paid her a visit. (Pleasingly, Spielberg again locates all-American innocence in Missouri, the state to which Kate Capshaw’s Willie Scott wished to return after having been put through the mill in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.) Over the course of the film, Daniel and Margaret, separately or as a duo, must dodge Wardex’s efforts to silence or sideline them. Margaret busts out of a hospital populated with suspicious government types, while Daniel seeks refuge with his loving, greatly tolerant girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), in abandoned, off-the-grid structures. Once Daniel and Margaret have met up, they catapult themselves aboard a train while evading bullets. We are treated to some first-class set pieces, including one straight out of Hitchcock. Using mind-control gear evidently purloined from crashed UFOs, Noah remotely enters the consciousness of Jane, a former Catholic postulant who, when not under the influence of nefarious actors, gamely tries to incorporate alien civilizations into her theology. (Spielberg remains respectful of traditional religious belief to the extent that a nun is among the movie’s most likable characters.) Yet Noah, in this dazzlingly suspenseful scene, transmits to Jane the desire to kill Daniel — to do Wardex’s dirty work, in other words. Agonizingly, we watch as Jane lies in wait for Daniel to return — the tip of a kitchen knife poking from her sleeve. (Spoiler alert: she snaps out of this lethal trance.) Later, Daniel, Margaret, and a cadre of whistleblowers marshal alien tech to turn invisible while warding off Wardex officials, who, comically, find themselves running into unseen objects and obstacles like Keystone Cops. REVIEW: WHY DO WE FEEL BECKONED BY BACKROOMS? Thanks to such stellar set pieces, Disclosure Day is seldom less than gripping. As Margaret, Blunt is especially good — just off-kilter enough in her daily life for her good-natured, guitar-strumming boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) to think that her obvious signs of prior alien contact might mean she’s just having a bad day. Inevitably, Daniel and Margaret combine forces so they can make the disclosure promised in the title: Daniel, with his abundance of flash drives; and Margaret, with her access to a local TV station — which, in the film’s universe, is apparently a sufficient platform from which to reach the whole world. Does this movie change the course of Spielberg’s career as it enters its last act? Not quite. But, as we approach what is likely to be a punishingly bland summer movie season, the director is to be credited for fashioning a first-rate entertainment from what could have been a retread. Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.

Playwright Peter Shaffer (1926-2016) chased the same idea for 30 years. A mild-mannered, rule-bound protagonist meets a counterpart who is wild at heart. Our hero is at first repelled but soon becomes fascinated, envious, even obsessed. Theatergoers who remember Five Finger Exercise (1958), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Equus (1973), and Lettice and Lovage (1987) will recognize the theme. Virtue may be its own reward, but passion is the only sure road to transcendence.  Amadeus, winner of the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play, is perhaps Shaffer’s clearest expression of this conceit. Set in 18th-century Vienna, the play concerns the relationship between staid court composer Antonio Salieri and brilliant vulgarian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Convinced that “music is God’s art,” Salieri despairs to realize that his unworthy rival has been chosen as the Almighty’s vessel. (“Let your sound enter me! Let me be your voice!”) Thus dejected, Salieri sets out to destroy his adversary, aware all the while that Mozart has lived and worked in a higher register than Salieri will ever reach.  The new five-part take on Shaffer’s masterpiece, airing on Starz, preserves this tension. (The series premiered late last year on Sky Atlantic.) Played by a wan Paul Bettany, Salieri is a broken man, increasingly possessed by the notion that God has blessed the wrong servant. Mozart, lent reckless bravado by The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe, is an infuriating genius, careless of his gift and far more concerned with his seduction of soprano Constanze Weber (Gabrielle Creevy). Viewers of this television adaptation will inevitably hearken back to Amadeus, the film, Milos Forman’s Oscar-winning 1984 version starring F. Murray Abraham as Salieri and Tom Hulce as Mozart. Let’s clear things up right now: The movie is far better. Nevertheless, the series is not without its appeal. Given room to expand, Shaffer’s source material proves more than able to support an expanded TV runtime.  It is aided by a pair of compelling supporting performances. As Mozart’s illicit-lover-turned-wife, Creevy captures well the equipoise required of a strong woman among self-worshiping men. Note the insouciance with which, in an early episode, she disarms an unwanted advance by revealing a pregnant belly. Even better is a scene-stealing Rory Kinnear as Emperor Joseph, an arts patron so world-weary he can barely remember which opera plots he’s banned. Taken together, these characters make a clever joke of the Enlightenment: Suppress rape and despotism, and one is left with sexual harassment and ministerial feuds. Yet Creevy’s work, at least, is not entirely comic. While Mozart is writing and conducting his world-bestriding Marriage of Figaro, Constanze is at home, abandoned, mourning in solitude the death of the pair’s infant son.  Will Sharpe in ‘Amadeus’. (Adrienn Szabo/Sky UK Ltd) Shaffer’s drama, in its original form, was not long enough to give full humanity to its eponymous enfant terrible. The show, by contrast, attempts the task but fails, largely on the basis of poor casting. Like Jesse Eisenberg or Adam Driver, Sharpe belongs to a class of actors so contemporary in manner that they ought not to play last week, never mind last millennium. Bro-ish, halting, and more than a little reminiscent of a young Keanu Reeves, the 39-year-old is about as believable in the Habsburg Empire as Twain’s Connecticut Yankee was in King Arthur’s court.  Weirdly, showrunner Joe Barton’s scripts suffer from the same flaw. In place of Shaffer’s period-appropriate stylizations (“The devil take the lot of them!”), we get such au courant cliches as “Well, anyway” and “Yes, no,” two discourse-marking tics that occur dozens of times in the show’s five episodes. Why not go the whole distance and replace Mozart’s letters with pings on Slack? The problem with these departures from verisimilitude is that authenticity is like Chesterton’s fence: tear it down at your peril. Rather than sustaining the viewer’s passage through his historical world, Barton deliberately challenges it.  Given the universality of Shaffer’s ideas, this is the very opposite of wisdom. To “presentize” 18th-century Vienna in speech or style is to suggest that jealousy and obsession are merely contemporary concerns, an implication that bears less than a moment’s scrutiny. Indeed, if Shaffer’s oeuvre demonstrates anything, it’s that mankind’s fundamental sins are the same in Austria as in Incan Peru, among bourgeois Brits as among melancholic shrinks. One is reminded of the Roman playwright Terence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” This updated Amadeus series would have done well to keep the dictum in mind.  A CRITIC TAKES THE MEASURE OF ‘BLUEY’ Yet the show is not, on the whole, badly done. Bettany, a welcome presence on my screens at least since 2003’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, holds his own in a role previously filled by Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen, and David Suchet (in addition to Abraham, in his Oscar-winning turn in the Forman film). And, though compromised by the show’s 21st-century affectations, Shaffer’s themes and characters have the strength to hold audiences’ attention. In creating a man just skilled enough to recognize his own mediocrity, the playwright gives us a type who really is, as Salieri so dearly wishes to be, immortal.  The crowning touch, of course, is Mozart’s music, used frequently and well throughout the show. I defy anyone not to be moved as the second episode cuts between the composer’s Great Mass in C Minor and Salieri’s pained recognition of his rival’s brilliance. Even on first hearing, our hero understands that Mozart’s notes are eternal. Just for a moment, we wish, along with him, that we had written them.  Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.