So another Green Party candidate has stood down to spend more time with his anti-Semitism allegations.
Yesterday, a mere nine hours after being announced as the Greens’ man in the Makerfield by-election, Chris Kennedy withdrew, citing ‘personal and family reasons’. Shortly after, The Times revealed Kennedy had shared social-media posts suggesting the firebombing of Jewish-run ambulances in Golders Green was a ‘false flag’ – staged, presumably, by those sneaky Zionists.
We used to call Jeremy Corbyn the world’s unluckiest anti-racist – mocking the remarkable consistency with which the disgraced former Labour leader, and supposed lifelong opponent of bigotry, would end up absent-mindedly praising an anti-Semitic mural, or being photographed in front of a Hezbollah flag at a protest.
Truly, the Greens have taken up Corbyn’s hapless mantle. Barely a day goes by without the world’s unluckiest anti-racist party – which draws its pungent sense of moral superiority from its supposed opposition to ‘racist’ right-wingers – being forced to appear shocked and surprised when presented with its own candidates’ ugly missives about Jews, Israel and anti-Semitism.
Kennedy reportedly shared a video on Instagram which described the arrests of two men in connection with the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances in north London in March as ‘total bullshit to keep the false flag flying’. He also shared a similar post by a Jew-bashing ethnonationalist named Hugh Anthony, who I gather is a Poundland Nick Fuentes. The Horseshoe Theory lives.
Here we go again. This comes after record-breaking local elections for the Greens, in which they racked up more seats and more anti-Semitism scandals than ever before. Two of their candidates were arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred. Almost 20 others were found to have aired their own fetid bigotries online, including a would-be councillor who called Jews ‘cockroaches’. Who have they got vetting these people? The IRGC? The ghost of Heinrich Himmler? Candace Owens?
Kennedy ‘apologises for the offence caused’, the Greens assure us. You would have thought he had thoughtlessly said ‘coloured people’ instead of ‘people of colour’, rather than wondered out loud if an anti-Semitic attack had been staged for political reasons. Kennedy, a nurse and children’s safeguarding specialist, is not some crypto-Islamist, either. His careless Insta-fingers are an alarming indication of how marinated your average ‘progressive’ now is in online Jew-baiting conspiracism.
And to think the Greens continue to fancy themselves as doughty defenders of multicultural Britain – standing athwart populism, yelling ‘stop’. In a statement following Kennedy’s resignation, but before the social-media posts were made public, the party said it was ‘redoubling our efforts on campaigning to expose the risk of Reform, a party who seeks to divide our communities’. Apparently, railing against mass and illegal migration – a sorry mess opposed by most Brits, including half of ethnic-minority Brits – makes Reform ‘divisive’. Meanwhile, the Greens’ giddy embrace of Israelophobia has turned its candidates lists into a putrid melange of Hamas apologists, Islamic sectarians, leftish useful idiots and even some unabashed anti-Semites.
The defenestration of Kennedy comes after a drip-fed cancellation campaign against Reform’s candidate, local plumber Robert Kenyon. Supposed anti-fascist groups and their media handlers have been trawling through Kenyon’s old – and recently deleted – social-media accounts, desperate to patch together a rap sheet. So far, we’ve learned that he called illegal migration an ‘invasion’, dabbled in vaccine scepticism and praised one Donald Trump. You can agree or disagree with his opinions, or the way he chose to express them, but none of this amounts to the rantings of a dangerous extremist.
You can almost smell the desperation of the offence archaeologists at this point. Yesterday, Hope Not Hate accused Kenyon of ‘calling for violence’. The truth? He said – clearly in jest – that those who broke lockdown rules during Covid should be waterboarded by the police, which HNH soberly reminds us is ‘a method of torture which is prohibited by international human-rights law’. He also said Richard Branson should be hanged for taking furlough money. I can’t claim to know Kenyon’s mind, but I’d be amazed if he meant this literally. This is just taking testy, risqué, jokey online comments as if they were dead-serious statements of principle. You hear worse in most pubs most nights.
Easily the most headline-grabbing accusation hurled at Kenyon is that he was once Facebook ‘friends’ with a full-blown fascist. Gary Raikes, leader of far-right micro-party the New British Union, appears to be an Oswald Mosley cosplayer, complete with the tragic little uniform. Those old enough to still be on Facebook will have collected some colourful characters over the years, but few as unsavoury as Raikes. Nevertheless, Reform insists Kenyon never interacted with the man and does not endorse him. Reform leader Nigel Farage has since suggested Raikes was one of ‘hundreds’ of people who flocked to Kenyon’s Facebook page when he first stood for parliament in 2024. Until the Hope Not Haters uncover a picture of Kenyon in his own fashy bib and tucker, this remains guilt by tenuous online association.
Candidacy means scrutiny. The decision to hastily delete some of Kenyon’s accounts and posts has clearly backfired. But this tale of two candidates and their social-media histories tells us something about our strange political time – in which progressives tone-police working-class people when they dare to pipe up about immigration, while those same progressives unthinkingly share anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; in which we’re told the populists are sinister and divisive, while proudly ‘anti-racist’ parties become magnets for Jew haters.
In Makerfield, the warped morality of the cancel-happy left is plain for all to see.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.
Ageing doesn’t always mean decline, particularly if you don’t expect it to. One study involving more than 11,000 participants found that almost half improved either their physical or mental capacity after their 65th birthday; people who improved on one or both metrics were likelier to have a positive view of ageing.
But what about personality?
A paper published in the journal Communications Psychology put 165 adults (a younger set in their 20s, and another group aged between 60 and 80) through an eight-week training course designed to help them handle stress and social situations.
They found what study author Professor Dr Cornelia Wrzus called a “striking and unexpected result” among the older cohort.
Participants were given personality tests before and at various stages after their training.
These aimed to find out about traits like emotional stability and extraversion.
Both groups performed better on these scores after the eight-week intervention, including a year after it ended.
“Investigations [on personality changes] frequently focus on young adults between the ages of 18 and 30,” Prof Wrzus said.
But after looking at the results of this study, the professor said her team found that the average change in behaviour barely varied between the age groups.
This was a “striking and unexpected result, since it seems more difficult for older adults to learn something new, like a foreign language or a musical instrument,” Prof Wrzus said.
The researchers also asked the participants to describe how intensively they practiced the tasks given to them during the training course.
They found that 60+-year-olds typically engaged more enthusiastically with things like coursework and at-home tasks, perhaps explaining the “unexpected” outcomes.
“Our study results somewhat contradict the adage that ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. That is good news for aging populations,” Prof Wrzus stated.
“When people are sufficiently motivated, they maintain the ability to change and learn new things.”
Dame Helen Mirren has shot down the rumours of behind-the-scenes tension on the set of MobLand between herself and co-star Tom Hardy.
Last month, it was widely reported that Tom had been fired from the Paramount+ crime drama after the second season wrapped, after allegedly clashing with producers.
According to a “source” quoted in The Hollywood Reporter in May, Tom had also “refused to come out of his trailer for hours at a time”, leaving his co-stars waiting for him so they could shoot.
However, Dame Helen has now insisted that there is no bad blood between herself and her co-star.
“As long as what’s on the screen is fantastic, I’m totally chilled with whatever, however anyone gets there,” she told Deadline.
Dame Helen said she would work with the Inception actor in a “heartbeat”, but did admit they had “different” creative “processes”.
“I love Tom. I think he’s the most amazing actor. I’ve always loved him on screen and different actors have different processes. I’ve learned over the years that some people get things fast and other people took time,” the Oscar winner said.
She added: “He’s got the kindest heart… I think he’s absolutely remarkable. So my support of him is genuine and heartfelt.”
Millie Turner/Invision/AP
When asked if she thought Tom would return to MobLand, Dame Helen said she hoped it would happen.
She explained: “When you have these sort of very powerful artistic people working together, the creative process is very challenging and people can get their knickers in a twist, as we say.
“But yes, we will go forward, absolutely, and it’ll be even better.”
This isn’t the first time Dame Helen has shown Tom her support. Last month, shortly after articles in the press about Tom’s alleged on-set behaviour were published, she posted an Instagram photo of him alongside the caption: “Love you now and always.”
Following the initial rumours of Tom being axed, Variety later suggested that he had, in fact, not been fired and that “the door is not closed for season three and things are being worked through creatively”.
HuffPost UK contacted Paramount+ for comment last month, but did not receive a response.
MobLand returns to Paramount+ for its second season later this year.
Keir Starmer’s Labour party is trying to push a bill through Parliament that amounts to legalising bribery.
Clause 60 of the Representation of the People bill will remove caps on political donations and de-couple donations from companies’ UK taxable profits. Starmer has already pulled murky political tricks to mask its passage so far. He is ignoring almost all the recommendations of Labour’s own already-weak ‘Rycroft Review‘ into foreign political interference. UK state-corporate media are ignoring the bill.
This video from the Canary explains:
View this post on Instagram
Starmer already sold the party to the super-rich when members deserted the hollow corpse he made Labour into after Corbyn. Now he wants the freedom to crawl even deeper into their pockets – and up their backsides.
Featured image via Peter Nicholls / Getty Images
By Skwawkbox
World Cup history is awash with politics — and politicians — intruding on the soccer.
For almost a century, leaders ranging from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to Argentine military junta boss Jorge Videla to French President Jacques Chirac have sought to score political points from the tournament.
This year’s competition is also not the first to be overshadowed by conflict. North Korea tried to upstage the event in 2002 with a bloody naval assault on South Korea, and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina loomed over the 1982 World Cup.
In 1934, Mussolini viewed a World Cup victory as a way to symbolize Italian might. Brazilian dictator Emílio Médici said that the 1970 triumph was testament to his country’s greatness. Memories of the Falklands provided fraught context to England’s clash with Argentina in 1986, one of the most famous games in the tournament’s history.
In more recent times, Chirac cast himself as a big fan of the all-conquering, racially diverse French national team in 1998. Vladimir Putin exploited the 2018 tournament to project Russian soft power, while Gulf petromonarchy Qatar used the 2022 edition as part of a major nation-building project.
And this year, it’s the the politics of MAGA — an ongoing foreign war and domestic immigration crackdown — that are coming back to bite soccer’s governing body FIFA.
Our first letter was answered/dismissed by “Service Adviser 1989847”, so this reply to our second one, while it doesn’t say much, definitely feels like a step up.
Our KC has offered all possible assistance to the Cyber and Fraud Unit in relation to the matter, and we’ll keep you posted with any developments, readers.
John Healey has done something unfashionable for a politician in our times: he has resigned, not over a sex scandal, a briefing war or a manufactured media row, but over a matter of substance. The now former UK defence secretary says the government will not properly fund the defence of the realm. He is correct, and he deserves commendation for upholding such high principles.
Healey’s resignation is an indictment of Keir Starmer’s government. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was meant to be the moment when Starmer’s solemn talk about a dangerous world would be turned into hard commitments: defined funding for ships, missiles, drones, air defence, munitions stockpiles, personnel and industrial capacity. Instead, Healey says he was shown a settlement that would limit spending to just 2.68 per cent of GDP by 2030, short of the three per cent he judged necessary, and a mere 0.08 percentage-point increase over four years.
There is no mystery about why the money is missing. Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves bottled welfare reform. Last year, facing a Labour backbench revolt, the government gutted its planned savings from sickness and disability benefits of £5 billion annually. The u-turn meant the reforms would no longer save taxpayers any money and had shredded the margin Reeves needed to meet her fiscal rules.
This is the basic arithmetic of government. You cannot fund a swollen welfare state, an unreformed NHS, Net Zero, debt interest and national defence all at once. In the real world, priorities must be set. Labour has chosen welfare dependency over military readiness. It has chosen to appease backbenchers over the first responsibility of any government – to protect its people.
Starmer is not solely to blame for this sorry state of affairs. Britain’s armed forces have been hollowed out over many years. The Cameron-Osborne austerity settlement began a long era of strategic negligence. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review cut defence spending by eight per cent. A military that cannot sustain combat is nothing more than an advertising campaign masquerading as an army. And that is what we are left with.
The Ajax tank farce is emblematic of the sickness. The programme was supposed to deliver a modern, armoured reconnaissance vehicle. Instead, it has become a monument to defence dysfunction – years late, billions wasted, the tanks plagued by defects so serious soldiers were harmed in training. Ajax was expected to enter service in 2017. The tanks are now expected to be operational – at best – by 2028.
The Ministry of Defence excels at producing acronyms, reviews and procurement frameworks, yet struggles to deliver fighting power at speed and scale. A 2023 Defence Committee report on the procurement system described it as bureaucratic, slow, poorly accountable and in need of comprehensive reform. Britain has talented officials, engineers and service personnel. It lacks a governing class willing to make hard choices, enforce accountability and accept that defence exists to deter enemies and, if necessary, win wars.
The delayed DIP has turned that failure into a national humiliation. The Public Accounts Committee warned this week that the delay had undermined Britain’s credibility with allies and weakened its ability to deter adversaries.
It will take far more than speeches to make forces combat-ready. Defence companies cannot invest on the basis of ministerial mood music – they need hard commitments. Our NATO allies cannot plan around such vagueness, either.
This is why Healey deserves respect for his resignation. He did not fix the system. He did not reverse the hollowing out. He presided over part of the drift. Yet when finally confronted with an underfunded plan, he refused to front it. So too has Al Carns, the armed forces minister. In his resignation statement – made on the same day as Healey’s – Carns said: ‘We ask soldiers to fight for this country. In return, we owe them the kit to do the job.’
The chief of the defence staff and his subordinate generals, admirals and air marshals should follow suit. Leadership demands accountability, and senior leadership in the Ministry of Defence should take Healey’s example as a lesson; otherwise, nothing will change.
Britain’s defence establishment now faces a brutal question: does the state still believe national defence is its first duty? At present, the answer is not good. The armed forces are too small, too thinly resourced and procurement is poor.
John Healey’s departure has exposed the truth. Britain lacks a Ministry of Defence, a Treasury, or a defence policy worthy of the threats we face.
Andrew Fox is a retired Parachute Regiment officer, a senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, and co-host of The Brink podcast.
The pioneering British artist David Hockney has died at the age of 88.
On Friday morning, his publicist, Erica Bolton, announced that the legendary painter had died at his home the previous day.
Her statement read: “The celebrated British artist David Hockney, one of the most important figures in contemporary art in both the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away peacefully at home on 11 June 2026, one month short of his 89th birthday.”
Born in Bradford in the July of 1937, David studied as a young man at the Royal College of Art, before making the move to California.
First making a name for himself in the 1960s as a leading figure in the pop art movement, David became synonymous with his brightly-coloured swimming pool paintings in the early years of his professional art career.
His other most notable works included portraits using various media of key figures in his personal life – including family members, friends and lovers – many of whom he revisited numerous times over the course of his decades-long career in different works.
During his lifetime, he repeatedly stated that his ethos when it came to art was to “paint the things you love”.
In 2018, he set a new record when his painting Portrait Of An Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at an auction for around £70 million, the highest figure ever for a work by a living artist.
His accolades included the Alfred Toepfer Foundation’s Shakespeare prize and being named Britain’s most influential artist in a 2012 poll of painters and sculptors.
David was also appointed to the Order of Merit in 2012, having declined a knighthood years earlier, claiming in the early 1990s that he didn’t “rate prizes”.
An exhibition of recent paintings by David is currently on display at London’s Serpentine gallery.
Reform’s deputy leader was left squirming by a GB News journalist over the party’s record on defence.
Richard Tice clashed with Christopher Hope, the broadcaster’s political editor, after John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary.
Hope said the fact that Reform does not even have a designated defence spokesman showed the party “isn’t serious” about the issue.
At one point in the live interview, Tice even claimed that Nigel Farage, the party’s leader, was also its defence spokesman.
Hope told him: “You don’t take it seriously … you don’t have a defence spokesman. That says everything about your seriousness as a party.
“If you think you are a serious party on defence, who is your spokesman?”
A clearly-flustered Tice insisted that “what matters” is Reform’s pledge to boost defence spending.
“We’ve shown how you do it, that’s what matters,” he said. “That’s why we’re leading in the polls.”
But Hope asked him again: “Can you name your defence spokesman? It’s not an MP, is it? It’s someone else. Who is your defence spokesman?”
Tice said: “Listen, Nigel and I cover foreign and defence, and we know how you get the money. You scrap net zero, you provide at least an extra £10-£20 billion as required in order to keep British citizens safe.”
Hope hit back: “But your party isn’t serious without having a defence spokesman. You can’t come on GB News – it insults our viewers for you to say it’s important.”
Watch the full clash below.
Subscribe to Commons People, the podcast that makes politics easy. Every week, Kevin Schofield and Kate Nicholson unpack the week’s biggest stories to keep you informed. Join us for straightforward analysis of what’s going on at Westminster.
At first glance, they look like two distinct scandals. Fire and violence on the streets of Belfast following the vicious gouging of a local man’s eyes by a suspect from Sudan. And then the resignation of virtually the entire defence wing of Keir Starmer’s cabinet, including the secretary of state for defence, John Healey. Yet both that riotous fury and the polite but scathing resignations flow from the same toxic source – the almost total withering of our kingdom’s ability to defend itself from external menace.
The defence storm swirling around Sir Keir feels staggering. It is the most serious act yet in the tragicomedy of his government’s slow-motion unravelling. First Healey went, and as he did, he issued a stinging verdict on Starmer. You are ‘unable’, he said in his letter of resignation, ‘to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats’. He was followed by the armed forces minister, Al Carns. To send men to war without proper funding and equipment is a scandal, Carns said. ‘We ask soldiers to fight for this country. In return, we owe them the kit to do the job.’
This feels existential, not just for Starmer’s knackered administration but for the entire machinery of the state. And for us, the people that machinery is meant to defend. Just like that, Britain lost the minister in charge of securing the realm from foreign threats and the minister who oversees our fighting forces. Who’s protecting the kingdom? The gossip-lovers of the SW1 media class are folding the Healey / Carns walkout into the psychodrama of Starmer’s collapsing authority. It’s true these resignations could bring about the endgame for Sir Keir. But they raise a far more perilous prospect: that we are bearing grim witness to the endgame of British sovereignty.
The immediate cause of the defence establishment’s fury with Sir Keir is the question of funding. Healey lays into the Defence Investment Plan, the government’s 10-year blueprint for financing and modernising the military. The plan ‘falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time’, he says. With Starmer’s scraps, Britain will struggle to meet the target of raising our defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, Healey writes. President Trump won’t be happy: he’s been pressing his European allies to stop feasting at the teat of America’s military prowess and raise their defence spending to four per cent of GDP.
Nothing better captures the fall of Britain than the fact we now spaff more cash on caring for people with ‘long-term health conditions’ than we do on training men and women to defend us from our foes. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change reckons annual spending on health and disability benefits for working-age adults will rise to £73.4 billion by 2030. Our annual defence budget is currently £62 billion. Yes, a lot of disability spending goes on people who need it. But some doesn’t. A nation that spends more on the upkeep of the lethargic youth of the middle classes who TikTok about their ADHD than it does on men and women who are willing to risk life and limb for their compatriots is a nation in name only.
But this is more than a money problem. It isn’t just flagging cashflow that means our ruling classes can’t get a handle on defending the country. It’s also their own flagging belief in the very virtue of sovereignty, their shameful failure to recognise the people’s longing for security. Carns touches on this in his resignation letter. ‘National resilience’, he says, ‘is about more than defence in the narrow sense’. A ‘strong country’ is also one where ‘working people feel economically secure, public services function, energy is resilient [and] communities are stable’. And right now, he says, we have none of that.
He’s right. Millions of people feel not only that the nation is undefended but that they are, too. Their communities, their beliefs, their way of life – it feels like the fencing around all of it has been wilfully dismantled, exposing their daily existence to cultural and even physical assault. ‘Defence’ means more than a well-armed deterrent against foreign invasion. It’s also a living, breathing virtue in and of itself, the thing that gives citizens the confidence to act freely and authoritatively in their communities. Dismantle defence and you don’t only endanger the nation – you also fracture the foundations of everyday life.
This is why Belfast matters here. It’s reported that the knife-wielding suspect flew from Paris to Dublin and then hopped on a bus to Belfast where he was granted leave to remain. That’s a defence crisis, too. The erosion of our sovereign integrity by a political class drunk on the Kool-Aid of globalism has been disastrous for community life. Untold numbers of unvetted men from regressive cultures have been introduced to working-class communities. The result is tension, crime and atrocities like the gang rape on Brighton beach, the ‘grooming’ of girls in Doncaster and the attempted beheading in Belfast. The state’s failure to defend the realm is being paid for with the suffering of the working class.
This week, a man from Pakistan was sentenced for raping a ‘particularly vulnerable’ 18-year-old woman in a park in Nottinghamshire. He had lived in Italy, Germany and France before coming here and saying he needed asylum. And the state believed him. Not even a year later, he had carried out his vile rape. What are we doing? A nation whose patriotic songs remind us we once ‘ruled the waves’ now can’t even stop dinghies of the wretched from arriving on our shores. The state that helped to defeat the Third Reich takes weeks to get a ship to the Persian Gulf. A country that’s existed for a thousand years can’t protect its women from foreign men with ill intent. The social experiment of a globalist utopia has proven deadly. Time to end it.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
Critics have been weighing in on Disclosure Day, which sees Steven Spielberg returning to his beloved science fiction genre.
In his latest big-screen offering, the legendary filmmaker is once again exploring the idea of extraterrestrial beings coming to earth – only this time he’s taking a close look at the philosophical and religious implications of an alien invasion.
Disclosure Day boasts a star-studded cast that includes Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor and Colin Firth, and tells the story of a small group of individuals who become involved in a government conspiracy to keep the existence of intelligent alien life a secret.
Early reviews hailed the film as a “gripping” and “thrilling’ masterpiece from the legendary director, earning an 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
However, not all reviewers were in love with the new sci-fi blockbuster, with some critics – including several from prominent British outlets – claiming it is “drab” and a “rehash” of Spielberg’s past works.
Here’s a selection of what critics are saying about Disclosure Day…
“Disclosure Day feels not like a repetition but like a thunderclap culmination, the kind of movie you make when, at age 79, you’re not only at the peak of your skills, but you realise time is running out. What, exactly, do you want to say, and how do you find the pictures, the words?
“The pictures and words are all right there in Disclosure Day, an eleventh-hour plea to reconnect with all that makes us human, even if we need to invoke the help of imaginary aliens to do it.”
“Disclosure Day has many layers, but it is also a crackerjack rip-roaring ride for much of its running time, a movie that essentially centres on two main characters in search of answers to what is happening to them, keeping the audience in the dark as much as they are.”
“What Spielberg has conjured here is some of his vintage boldness in transforming the cinema screen into a magical theatre of childlike wonder.”
“While Spielberg has never lost his sense of fun, Disclosure Day is uniquely fortified by the sense that he’s still searching for new ways to enrapture a jaded audience with his spectacle, and the movie’s ethos becomes that much harder to deny every time its director manages to suspend our disbelief all over again.
“There might not be anything here quite as inventive as the spider robot sequence from Minority Report, but a certain setpiece – the one that starts with a car getting shoved into an oncoming freight train – is as gripping as Hollywood action gets.”
“Disclosure Day is never anything other than entertaining and grade-A fun; rare enough in the movies or anywhere else, rocketing along with barnstorming set-pieces, exhilarating chases, funny lines and a career-topper of a performance from Blunt who may yet be morphing into a female version of Tom Hanks.”
“The movie duly pulls out all the stops, and then a couple more. As if to say, ‘still got it!’, there are big-ticket action sequences and the screwball comic interludes Spielberg always had a knack for. The ride is rarely dull.”
“There are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.”
“The film is, in a lot of ways, vintage Spielberg: He hasn’t lost a step with a camera that sprints from start to finish, there are some fantastic technical sequences, and the performances from the two leads in particular are great.
“And while Disclosure Day stumbles a bit for me at the finish line in a way that makes some of the film’s other nits a little more worth picking, it’s still an original, big-budget science fiction conversation-starter from one of cinema’s all-time greats.”
“While Disclosure Day doesn’t live up to the high standards he’s [Spielberg] set, it’s still a thrill ride, thumbing its nose at authority and begging its audience for more empathy, not less.
“Even if not all the pieces snap flawlessly into place, Disclosure Day is a reminder of how much magic is still left up Spielberg’s sleeve.”
“[Disclosure Day’s] script exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond to such a revelation, and Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift.
“That waffling ultimately strands Disclosure Day on a heartfelt yet fuzzy middle ground, with a generalised plea for cross-species understanding that, even bolstered by the reliable stirrings of a John Williams score, left me dispiritingly dry-eyed.”
“Spielberg, as part of the film’s publicity, has suggested that he believes in alien visitations, and that he’s an advocate for disclosure. But where Close Encounters tapped into the mystery of all this with an innocence that was both starry-eyed and spectacular, Disclosure Day feels like a thriller docudrama that’s too cut-and-dried about what it believes.
“The actors are quite good (especially Blunt, who makes you feel she’s seeing the uncanny), but for all the film’s slow build it doesn’t take us anywhere overly surprising. It just confirms the ‘truth’ that’s been out there for so long it’s starting to feel like a fairy tale for the dispossessed.”
“Essentially, it’s a drab X-Files episode, or a more conventional One Battle After Another, in which some people we don’t care about are hunted by some other people we don’t care about.”
“Sadly, there’s nothing original here, or at least nothing to match, say, Jordan Peele’s vastly superior UFO drama Nope. Instead it’s just Spielberg badly rehashed, poorly reheated, lukewarm and with extra treacle.”
“It is shot and staged with Spielberg’s signature elegance: a central foot-to-car-to-train chase moves with such breathless lucidity it is as if the director is beaming excitement directly into your brain. But the plotting surrounding the action is often woolly and lopsided, while the tone is an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness.”
Disclosure Day is out in cinemas now.
Weekend Open Thread: Evereve – Corporette.com
The Best Mystery Series of All Time Is Surging on Streaming 30 Years After It Ended
Alexander Zverev wins the French Open to finally earn a 1st Grand Slam title
Anatomy of the June crypto crash: Fed, Iran, Saylor
Suspicious Polyfill login prompts pop up on Toshiba, Muji websites
Senator Cynthia Lummis Calls CLARITY Act the Most Consequential Financial Legislation of This Generation
Microsoft unveils seven homegrown AI models in new bid for ‘long term self-sufficiency’
Alexander Zverev conquers demons and outlasts Flavio Cobolli to win French Open for first major title
Oppenheimer backs SpaceX as $70 billion retail frenzy builds
Markets Rally as SpaceX IPO Looms Amid Iran Tensions and Inflation Surge
Von der Leyen’s AI envoy pick draws conflict-of-interest fire
High Stakes for Wembanyama as New York Pushes for 3-0 Lead
Hackers now exploit SolarWinds Serv-U flaw to crash servers
The Pain Points Taking a Fragile Tech Rally Down a Notch
Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents
Eli Lilly (LLY) Stock Surges 4% Following Breakthrough Sleep Apnea Trial Results
Notion restores access to Anthropic after service disruption
Trump’s AI Ownership Plan Could Benefit Anthropic at OpenAI’s Expense
Bangladesh beat Australia after 20 years in ODIs, register only their second win over six-time world champions | Cricket News
The investment to transform historic St Helen’s ground in Swansea
You must be logged in to post a comment Login