People are saying Disclosure Day is Steven Spielberg’s best movie in over 20 years, and I disagree. That’s mainly because I adored his previous film, The Fabelmans, which was in my top 10 of 2022. Still, after a career defined by science-fiction classics such as Jurassic Park (1993) and two of the most celebrated alien films ever made—Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)—Disclosure Day feels like a major return to form for the filmmaker.

As someone who’s spent most of her career working as a writer and is obsessed with movies, I couldn’t help but notice a recurring trend throughout the 2000s: the protagonists of so many movies—especially rom-coms—were writers, journalists, or worked for magazines. These characters did work they were proud of and somehow managed to afford lavish apartments in New York City, making journalism seem like the dream job. Even when The Devil Wears Prada (2006) pulled back the curtain on how exhausting and demanding that world could be beneath all the glamour, it still made surviving in the Big Apple on an assistant’s salary at a fashion magazine seem plausible. But perhaps times were different then.

Video review of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt