Disclosure Day: The truth is out there

Disclosure Day (2026) • View trailer

4.5 stars (out of five); rated R, for action violence, gruesome images and some profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.14.26 

This is 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind writ very large.

 

Director Steven Spielberg’s original story — fleshed out by skilled genre screenwriter David Koepp — hits the ground running, and trusts viewers to catch up.

 

Despite being surrounded by shadowy agents with orders to apprehend them, each
one unexpectedly steps aside as Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O'Connor)
slowly walk toward potential freedom.

The film opens suspensefully on a late-night hostage swap. Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) apparently stole something quite valuable from Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of WARDEX — “Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction” — a shadowy Department of Defense contractor that apparently answers to nobody. 

This is made clear by the fact that Casper Boyd (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), Scanlon’s go-to “dirty work” field agent, kidnapped Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), in order to facilitate this exchange. It looks fairly cut and dried ... until Daniel raises a small, slender, metallic bipyramid that he holds in one carefully gloved hand.

 

Scanlon and all of his black-garbed associates carefully back away.

 

Daniel and Jane flee, which kicks off the first of this film’s several pell-mell chase sequences. They manage to escape, much to Scanlon’s vexation. (Firth displays an impressive level of barely controlled rage.) But how can they stayhidden, given all the high-tech surveillance resources available to Scanlon? 

 

Meanwhile...

 

Chirpy Kansas City KCXE-TV news meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), after completing a day’s work, returns home to boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), a low-stress musician and Fruit Loops-loving Everyman. The following morning, before she leaves for the morning shift, they’re startled when a red cardinal flies in an open window and perches on the kitchen table. 

 

And stares at her. She stares back, trance-like, Blunt’s expression suddenly a blank, wordless slate.

 

Shaking herself from this fugue, she rushes off to work. After arriving at KCXE, she suddenly starts speaking in foreign languages ... including, as this scene’s uneasy atmosphere builds, a series of guttural clicks, burps and grunts that don’t sound the slightest bit human.

 

Shortly thereafter, she feels a strange, strong pull to go “somewhere else,” much to Jackson’s bewilderment. Somewhere north. 

 

Throughout scenes with these two sets of characters, disturbing radio reports and TV news broadcasts warn of the rapidly increasing probability of a world-wide nuclear war. The threat level jumps to DEFCON 2.

G20: An engaging guilty pleasure

G20 (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless violence

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Viola Davis isn’t the first Best Actress Oscar winner to turn into a kick-ass action hero — she was preceded by Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Helen Mirren and Jennifer Lawrence — but Davis definitely is the first EGOT to do so.

 

Secret Service Agent Manny Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez) helps President Danielle Sutton
(Viola Davis) to safety, as South Korean First Lady Han Min-Seo (MeeWha Alana Lee)
wisely follows.

(She achieved that status in 2023, when she won a Grammy Award for narrating her memoir, Finding Me, as an audiobook.)

I’d also argue that, even in full-blown battle mode, Davis is the most regal of the bunch.

 

G20 is pure hokum, but director Patricia Riggen and editors Doc Crotzer and Emma E. Hickox keep things moving rapidly enough to camouflage a plot that has more holes than the proverbial Swiss cheese. Honestly, the four credited scripters — Logan Miller, Noah Miller, Caitlin Parrish and Erica Weiss — could have tried a little harder.

 

(I also get a sense — given that production on this film took place in early 2024 — that all concerned envisioned this as wishful thinking about the upcoming real-world election, and cheekily built their story around a Black female U.S. president.

 

(Ah, if only...)

 

We’re introduced to President Danielle Sutton (Davis) as she’s dragged out of bed late one night, because her headstrong teenage daughter Serena (Marsai Martin) once again evaded her Secret Service handlers to sneak out of the White House. 

 

Thoroughly fed up — because the girl refuses to realize how such behavior places her in danger — Sutton and her husband, Derek (Anthony Anderson), decide to take Serena and her brother Demetrius (Christopher Farrar) to Cape Town, site of the annual G20 summit meeting, in order to keep her under strict surveillance.

 

This soon will place Serena and Demetrius in far greater danger than her midnight escapades, because...

 

...Summit security has been outsourced to a private outfit.

 

(“Stupid mistake!” we scream.)

News of the World: Deserves banner headlines

News of the World (2020) • View trailer

4.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for violence, occasional profanity, disturbing images and dramatic intensity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.31.20

Paul Greengrass always makes thoughtful, emotionally engaging films, whether crowd-pleasing thrillers — three entries in the Jason Bourne series — or ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, such as Bloody Sunday, United 93 and 22 July.

 

Having been stopped on the road by a gang of questionable intent, Jefferson Kidd
(Tom Hanks) and his young companion (Helena Zengel) are "escorted" into the
nearby community of Durand, their fate most definitely uncertain.

His newest, based on poet/author Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel of the same title, is a bit of both … due to current events that weren’t as obvious when she wrote her book.

 

News of the World — opening today in operational movie theaters — is set in early 1870, in the untamed and dangerous border between South Texas and Indian territory. Although the Civil War is five years gone, the nation remains bitterly divided; that’s particularly true in this state. Texas has yet to be readmitted to the Union, having refused thus far to ratify the 13th amendment banning slavery.

 

Patrols of Union soldiers maintain an uneasy peace in towns, and on the roads linking them; their presence is just as likely to inflame tension, as prevent it. Half of the population passionately fought for a vision of the country that was defeated; it’s unclear whether America — as a unified entity — can heal itself. Information itself is suspect, depending on its source.

 

Sound familiar?

 

Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a veteran of three wars, leads a peripatetic life within this environment. He travels from town to town, armed with newspapers and broadsheets, and draws crowds as a non-fiction storyteller who shares the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes and gripping incidents involving individual people.

 

He’s no Charles Dickens, with a thunderous and well-acted performance; he hunches over and squints through a magnifying glass while reading the tiny print aloud. But his delivery is no less captivating, thanks to Hanks’ warmth and sincerity; Kidd has a dignified bearing that grants him authority. People hang on his words, and he fills the house at 10 cents a head, thereby earning a meager but reliable living.

 

He’s wary and careful, when on the road with his humble wagon; roving bands of Union soldiers aren’t necessarily any safer than thieves and cutthroats.

 

One day he chances upon a frightened 10-year-old girl (Helena Zengel). Papers recovered from her demolished wagon — her adult companion having been lynched, due to his skin color — reveal that she’s Johanna Leonberger, whose family was killed six years earlier by the Kiowa tribe, who then raised her as one of their own. She’s now being returned to her biological aunt and uncle against her will, after her Kiowa home was burned by the soldiers who “rescued” her. In effect, she has been kidnapped twice.

 

Kidd hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with her. He tries first to enlist official Union aid; when that fails, he attempts to temporarily leave the girl in the care of friends in the nearest town. But she’s wild, speaks only Kiowa, and is hostile to this “civilized” world she never has experienced. Kidd ultimately decides to deliver her himself, to where the law insists she belongs.

 

Gifted: A thoughtful cinematic present

Gifted (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and rather harshly, for dramatic intensity and mild profanity
By Derrick Bang

Stage parents aren’t confined to Broadway theaters.

Indeed, they’re cropping up everywhere these days: from AYSO fields to reality TV shows — Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson’s parents really should be jailed, for child abuse — and from Suzuki music institutions to public school “gifted child” programs stalked by hyper-obsessive mothers and fathers.

When the obsessive/possessive Evelyn (Lindsay Duncan) meets granddaughter Mary
(McKenna Grace) for the first time, she immediately tries to bribe the little girl with a
laptop computer: a gesture that her son Frank (Chris Evans), Mary's uncle and guardian,
finds all too familiar.

Somehow, in far too many cases, the child becomes either a commodity, a cash cow, or the instrument by which the parents live out their unfulfilled dreams. Either way, a tragedy.

All of which makes Tom Flynn’s charming, astute and frequently heartbreaking original script for Gifted quite well-timed. It feels authentic, with the perceptive savvy of somebody who has Been There. Indeed, he acknowledges — in the film’s press notes — growing up with a sister who was “the most unassuming, ridiculously smart person you’ve ever met. When she was 5, everyone in the family was afraid of her, she was so determined.”

Director Marc Webb must’ve been on the same wavelength, because he has coaxed an extraordinary performance from young Mckenna Grace.

We meet 7-year-old Mary Adler (Grace) on the opening day of first grade, as she reluctantly boards a bus after considerable coaxing by Frank (Chris Evans). He’s not her father, as we soon discover, but her uncle; they live modestly in a tiny community along the Florida coast, where he repairs boats for a living. They share their home with a one-eyed, orange-and-white cat named Fred.

Best. Movie. Cat. In. Years. (Just sayin’.)

Mary is no ordinary child, which becomes apparent to teacher Bonnie Stevenson (Jenny Slate), during a math segment tailored for children accustomed to the basics of 3 plus 3.

No big deal, Frank hastily insists, when Bonnie later asks him about Mary’s ability to multiply large numbers in her head. It’s a trick; she uses the Trachtenberg System.

But Mary’s precocious nature — her best friend, aside from Frank, is their landlady Roberta (Octavia Spencer) — also comes to the attention of the snooty school principal, Ms. Davis (Elizabeth Marvel). Annoyed by Frank’s unexpected insistence that Mary remain in this school, as opposed to being transferred to a high-profile academic institution that’ll “better suit her gifts,” Ms. Davis digs into their past.