disclosure

When Mark Walter, the Lakers controlling owner, flipped the storied team last week for $12.5 billion amid a federal probe of his businesses, it stunned the sports world but seemed to make financial and legal sense.

The Dodgers majority owner, who had bought his stake in the basketball team last year at a $10-billion valuation, likely netted a big payday from the sale to former Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger and venture capitalist Joshua Kushner.

And that’s money the billionaire can apply to pay down the debts of two troubled Delaware life insurers he owns that are under federal scrutiny.

It’s not at all clear whether the sale of the Lakers will have any effect on the ongoing investigations. Neither Walter nor his companies have been charged with any crimes.

TWG Global, Walter’s holding company, did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but a spokesperson for the company has previously stated that they are cooperating with authorities and expect the matter to be resolved “favorably.”

“Mark Walter and TWG have always acted in good faith, and those who have done business with Mark know him as honest and straightforward,” the statement said.

After receiving federal grand jury subpoenas in February, Delaware Life and Clear Spring Life and Annuity conducted internal investigations. They found that $21 billion in loans they made should have been recorded as extended to “related parties.”

Related parties have business or personal ties and transactions between them can have legitimate reasons, but they also pose potential conflicts of interest and require disclosure and typically extra regulatory scrutiny.

In the case of insurers, which hold premium dollars from policyholders for future claims payouts, regulators want to ensure the money is there when it’s needed. Related-party transactions can threaten that.

Walter, 66, chief executive of Chicago investment firm Guggenheim Partners, led a group that included another Guggenheim executive and Magic Johnson in acquiring the Dodgers for $2.15 billion in 2012. The Times has reported he tapped the insurers he owned for financing, a deal that was later vetted by state insurance regulators.

However, the amount of related-party loans made by the two affiliated life insurers now under federal scrutiny is vastly more, amounting to 40% of the invested assets of Delaware Life as of Dec. 31, according to Fitch Ratings. The credit rating outfit said that is the most of any North American life insurers it reviews.

It’s unclear exactly where all the money went, but the Wall Street Journal reported billions were passed through a third party before being received by entities tied to Walter or his TWG Global holding company.

Company executives also told Fitch that they were unaware they were making related-party loans. Bloomberg reported that investigators are looking at some loans made to multiple companies affiliated with one Chicago firm to see if they were passed along to Walter’s ventures.

In June regulatory filings that disclosed the $21 billion in restatements, each insurer labeled them as “corrections of errors,” which would imply that they were inadvertent.

Jacob Frenkel, a former U.S. attorney, said it appears clear a focus of the investigation into Walter’s businesses is to determine whether the restatements were just errors.

“If there is intentional concealment of related-party transactions or the creation of intermediaries to help with that concealment, that certainly [could] invite criminal and civil enforcement scrutiny,” said Frenkel, who prosecuted financial crimes and also worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Authorities have seized Walter’s cellphone and laptop, according to Bloomberg. Still, investigations by prosecutors and securities regulators can result in no action.

Frenkel said that if criminality is found in complex investigations such as this one, federal prosecutors will typically file mail or wire fraud charges that carry up to 20 years in prison.

It would not matter whether a company that was the victim of fraudulent conduct closed or is able to continue conducting business after being rescued financially.

“The entity’s failure is not a prerequisite for there to be a crime in intentionally misleading conduct,” he said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a parallel investigation into both companies, according to their regulatory filings.

Frenkel said its interest could revolve around how Guggenheim Investments, Walter’s asset management firm, booked revenue from its dealings with the insurers and the disclosures of the transactions.

The SEC can seek civil monetary penalties and the return of illegal profits, and bar or suspend an individual from serving as a corporate officer or director, among other remedies.

Delaware Life and Clear Spring are part of TWG’s Group 1001 Life & Annuity.

Delaware Life has started a remediation plan to restructure some of the loans, review others and address its “control deficiencies,” including through TWG purchasing some of the loans, according to ratings outfit S&P Global. It hopes to complete the plan by the end of the year.

However, Fitch in its downgrade of Delaware Life said the plan may prove “insufficient to fully address governance, reporting, and investment oversight issues.”

The Delaware Department of Insurance did not respond to emails for comment.

Rex Frazier, a former deputy commissioner at the California Department of Insurance, said that in the situation that the insurers find themselves, the state regulator will be looking at a company’s capital sufficiency.

“The change from unaffiliated to affiliated transactions can affect the regulator’s view of whether the insurers have adequate capital and, if the regulator thinks not, then the regulator can impose additional capital requirements,” said Frazier, now president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California, a property and casualty industry trade group.

“If the regulator determines that there is inadequate capital to pay for their obligations … there are many serious remedies they can take to protect vulnerable people depending on those income streams,” he said, including seizing a company or forcing its sale.

There is no indication that either insurer is in such dire straits. Since the disclosures, rating agencies Fitch, AM Best and S&P Global have downgraded the companies’ outlook to negative, but they also have said the insurers maintain a high level of financial strength.

Walter is not the only owner of a life insurer to rely on related-party loans to fund its business dealings.

AM Best, in a December report, said affiliated investments among life insurers and annuity companies grew more than 17% annually in 2024 to more than $373 billion, driven by those owned by private equity and asset managers.

It said the growth of such investments — a type of related-party transactions — presents “regulatory risks” that may suggest “a company’s operations are more intertwined with its parent and affiliated investment management with possible negative consequences.”

“Should the parent/affiliate company experience financial stress, negative impacts to the insurer are heightened due to the higher exposure,” it said.

Frenkel said it’s good to keep in mind that at the end of their investigations, neither the Justice Department nor the SEC may take any action.

However, due to the complexity of the case, it may be a while before that point is even reached.

“This is clearly the type of investigation that the ‘where is this going?’ conversation could easily still be continuing in January of 2028,” he said.

June 30 (UPI) — President Donald Trump reported billions of dollars in income, revenue and other proceeds during his first year back in the White House, much of it tied to cryptocurrency ventures, according to his annual financial disclosure released Tuesday.

Trump reported at least $2.1 billion in income, revenue and other proceeds last year, according to his financial disclosure made public by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, with more than half tied to cryptocurrency.

Though Trump was initially skeptical about cryptocurrencies,, he embraced the digital currencies — and their supporters — during his third campaign for the White House. After being elected, he created what some analysts have called a crypto-friendly administration.

During his first year in office, he took several actions in support of the crypto industry, including signing a digital-assets executive order during his first week in office and creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve and U.S. digital asset stockpile.

The 927-page financial disclosure states the president reported more than $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency income and proceeds, including $635 million from his $TRUMP meme coin and nearly $800 million from World Liberty Financial, a Trump family-linked cryptocurrency venture.

The $TRUMP memecoin was a cryptocurrency Trump announced days before his inauguration. He announced the $MELANIA memecoin the day before he was inaugurated.

Memecoins are cryptocurrencies with little to no intrinsic utility, often derived from Internet memes and supported by online communities or fans.

After Trump announced the coins, critics accused him of attempting to profit from the presidency.

The disclosure also shows that Trump reported tens of millions in revenue from golf, resort and real estate-related holdings, including $121.9 million from Trump Doral, $77.5 million from Mar-a-Lago, $37.6 million from his Lamington Farm Club, $36.9 million from Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach and $31.6 million from his Jupiter Golf Club, among others.

Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi thriller, “Disclosure Day,” topped the box office this weekend, an encouraging sign for what could be a big summer for theaters.

The film, which stars Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, brought in $44 million in the U.S. and Canada for a worldwide total of $92.9 million, according to studio estimates. The opening weekend totals beat box office analysts’ expectations of about $40 million to $50 million.

“Disclosure Day” is Spielberg’s latest alien-centric movie that charts a desperate race to show the world the truth about extraterrestrials.

The film, which had a production budget of about $115 million, was also scored by legendary composer and longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, who is now 94 years old.

Spielberg described the film in April as “way closer to truth than fiction” during a speech at the CinemaCon trade convention in Las Vegas. The veteran director of 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 2005’s “War of the Worlds” said at the time that he’s been curious about “what’s going on in the night” since he was a child and “been very fixated on the possibilities.”

Focus Features’ “Obsession” came in second at the box office with a domestic haul of $19 million, a continuation of the film’s strong run in theaters.

“Scary Movie,” “Backrooms” and “Masters of the Universe” rounded out the top five at the box office.

Recent box office performance — particularly with Gen Z hits “Obsession” and A24’s “Backrooms” — along with a slate of upcoming blockbuster franchise installments has buoyed the hopes of exhibitors and studio executives for a strong summer.

Next week, Walt Disney Co. and Pixar will release “Toy Story 5,” while Warner Bros.’ DC Studios has “Supergirl” landing in late June.

Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters,” Disney’s live-action “Moana,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” are all slated for July.

That steady cadence of new and different films is key for a healthy box office and a successful summer, said Daniel Loria, editorial director at the Box Office Co.

“We’re seeing that momentum come back on a weekend-by-weekend basis,” he said. “What we needed to get back to a healthy industry post-pandemic is consistency, and that’s the difference here in 2026.”

Obsession is maybe too hard-edged; interest too soft. But from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T” to his new sci-fi thriller “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg has spent nearly the entire length of his career returning to the possibility that we are not alone in the universe. Even “Firelight,” the amateur movie he made as an Arizona teenager in 1964, revolved around extraterrestrial visitors.

That recurring fascination stands out partly because Spielberg has never been a filmmaker who stays in one lane. Across 36 features as a director, he has pivoted between science fiction, war films, historical dramas, adventure movies, thrillers, comedies and even a musical while somehow retaining the same famed Spielbergian sense of emotional wonder that defined his earliest work.

Which makes “Disclosure Day” — opening Friday and built around mysterious transmissions, buried government secrets and the possibility of alien contact — feel less like a detour than a return to one of Spielberg’s oldest creative preoccupations. Speaking about the film in March at SXSW, Spielberg admitted that while he has no special knowledge about extraterrestrial life, he nevertheless has “a very strong, sneaking suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now. And I made a movie about that.”

So with Spielberg once again looking skyward, we decided to revisit the director’s long cinematic relationship with aliens, as figures of astonishment, terror, transcendence and, occasionally, giant crystal skulls from another dimension.

Melinda Dillon and Cary Guffey in 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

(Columbia Pictures)

Josh Rottenberg: I don’t really remember a world without Spielberg’s aliens. I was 6 when “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” arrived in 1977, not much older than the little boy played by Cary Guffey who is carried off by visitors from another world after his toys mysteriously come to life. Five years later, I was exactly Elliott’s age when “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” landed in theaters in 1982.

“Close Encounters” made aliens feel weirdly plausible, not just creatures in a “Star Wars” cantina or rubber-suited monsters from old sci-fi movies but something that might turn up in ordinary American life through blinking kitchen appliances, strange lights in the sky and suburban middle-class dads who can’t explain why they suddenly need to drive to Wyoming.

What surprises me now is how hopeful the movie feels. It came out of the post-Watergate ’70s, when distrust of institutions was running high, but Spielberg directed most of that suspicion toward the government, not the alien visitors. Richard Dreyfuss sculpting Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes should seem completely insane — and it kind of is. But Spielberg somehow makes you understand why Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary is willing to walk away from his entire life and family over something he can’t explain.

With “E.T.,” Spielberg scaled that cosmic yearning down to a California cul-de-sac. I recently watched the movie again at Hollywood Forever Cemetery with my wife and younger daughter, who’s in college now. I’d seen it several times since 1982 but not on a big screen, and I was startled by how much of it I still knew by heart: E.T. shuffling through the kitchen drinking cans of Coors, Elliott freeing the frogs in science class, Drew Barrymore introducing the alien to her dolls like he’s a new kid who just moved in next door. Somewhere along the way, “E.T.” became less a movie to me than part of the background texture of childhood itself.

Spielberg turned one of science fiction’s grandest ideas — first contact with alien life — into the story of a boy and his weird little space-faring goblin best friend. Mark, we’re of the same Gen X vintage. Did Spielberg permanently convince you that aliens were basically on our side?

A scene from the 1982 movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.”

(Universal Pictures / Photofest)

Mark Olsen: I didn’t see “Close Encounters” when it was first in theaters, but I remember any kid with a piano learning those five notes of John Williams’ alien theme music and then the movie becoming a staple rental of the early VHS era.

When I revisited the film for its 2017 re-release — an overwhelming experience in the sorely missed Cinerama Dome, where the movie also played when it first opened — I was struck by how homespun and handmade it felt, grounded in a naturalistic sense of realism. For as much as Spielberg may be fascinated by aliens and whatever could be out there, he always uses them as a way to reconsider what is going on down here: to reconnect with the elemental aspects of humanity and our common bonds.

I’ll be honest and say that “E.T.” is a movie I have always struggled with. I clearly remember seeing the movie when I was young and being very disturbed by the scene when the government arrives and drapes the family’s house in plastic sheets and tubing. I distinctly recall recognizing that the film itself wanted me to feel bad — I didn’t like that. (Perhaps thus was a young critic born.) Spielberg is often so proud of his mechanics, he lets them show, which is why even then I was resistant to moments when he wants the relationship between Elliott and his new friend to truly take flight.

Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 sci-fi thriller “War of the Worlds.”

(Paramount Pictures)

Rottenberg: By 2005 and “War of the Worlds,” the wonderment was gone. Spielberg took H.G. Wells’ downbeat vision of extraterrestrials as exterminators and updated it for post-9/11 America: nightmarish scenes of alien tripods clawing their way up through the pavement, blaring air-raid horns, entire crowds vaporized into clouds of dust.

This time, nobody is trying to communicate through music or empathy. Tom Cruise spends the movie running through New Jersey with two terrified kids while ash drifts through the streets and giant alien war machines scoop humans into dangling metal cages. “E.T.” had turned aliens into plush toys and breakfast cereal. “War of the Worlds” turned them back into the menacing aggressors of 1950s sci-fi films like “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “Invaders From Mars.”

Which made it all the more jarring when, three years later, Spielberg suddenly swerved back toward old-school flying-saucer mythology with 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” shoehorning an extraterrestrial plot into one of his most beloved series. Seeing Cate Blanchett march into a glowing alien chamber to commune with giant crystal skeletons from another dimension, I could understand why some fans reacted like they’d just watched someone spray-paint a UFO on the Ark of the Covenant.

But looking back, the inclusion seems almost inevitable. Spielberg keeps circling back to aliens no matter what genre or franchise he’s working in. Even 2001’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” eventually reveals itself as a kind of inverted first-contact story, with humanity becoming the vanished civilization studied by synthetic descendants of the machines.

Mark, were you able to roll with Indy suddenly colliding with Area 51 mythology, or did Spielberg lose you at that point?

Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf in the 2008 movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

(David James / Paramount Pictures / Lucasfilm)

Olsen: There was something so eye-rollingly whatever about the finale of “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” that you couldn’t even really be mad about it. On a storytelling scale of Spielbergian preposterousness, the moment lands somewhere between the Wrath of God sequence in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (totally legit) and the time traveling of “Dial of Destiny” (throws hands in the air).

“War of the Worlds” remains a fascinating film within the director’s space alien canon because it has an anxiety and uncertainty that isn’t often found elsewhere. Even his core interest in creatures, so often a well of amazement and positivity, couldn’t pull him up. Much has been made of the film as a response to the aftermath of 9/11 and Spielberg followed it up with the existential thriller “Munich,” a further exploration of the darker aspects of the national mood, before the year was even up.

This seemed to be a moment of malaise for Spielberg, one he worked his way out of with an unpredictably wide-ranging series of films including “Lincoln,” “Bridge of Spies” and “The Post.” It was as if he were left reeling from cynicism and was trying to reclaim some youthful confidence that he would eventually rediscover with the autobiographical “The Fabelmans.” Josh, do you feel that “Disclosure Day” serves as the final word on Spielberg’s alien interests?

Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor in the movie “Disclosure Day.”

(Niko Tavernise / Universal Pictures)

Rottenberg: What makes “Disclosure Day” interesting to me — even though I wasn’t fully sold on it — is that Spielberg is returning to these ideas at a moment when UFO culture has already evolved far beyond him.

Screenwriter David Koepp has cited “Three Days of the Condor” as a touchstone, and for long and often gripping stretches, the movie really does play like a paranoid 1970s conspiracy thriller: cryptic transmissions, shadowy government programs, Josh O’Connor racing to expose buried secrets, Colin Firth strapped into a chair using alien technology to manipulate people from afar.

But while “Close Encounters” arrived at a time when UFOs still occupied this hazy space between science fiction, Cold War anxiety and New Age mysticism, “Disclosure Day” lands in a world where self-described UFO abductees have their own support groups and Congress has held multiple hearings about “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” Meanwhile, earlier this spring, the U.S. government declassified another batch of UFO files and the response was roughly equivalent to a collective shrug.

In recent interviews, Spielberg has said he now considers the circumstantial evidence for UFOs “overwhelming” and no longer views “Disclosure Day” as science fiction at all. In his earlier alien films, extraterrestrials represented mystery and escape. Here they feel more like vaguely benevolent interstellar therapists trying to help humanity get its act together. The film’s climax reaches for the same sense of civilizational awe as the mothership landing in “Close Encounters.” For me it didn’t quite get there.

But maybe that’s partly because it’s harder now to experience these ideas with the same innocence they carried in 1977 or 1982. Rewatching “E.T.” at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I still wanted to believe that an encounter with an alien intelligence could elevate us. But we’re a long way from Reese’s Pieces and flying bicycles. Mark, did “Disclosure Day” manage to pull you back into Spielberg’s orbit this time?

Olsen: I have to just get it out of the way that as someone from Kansas City, I will be eternally annoyed that Emily Blunt plays a TV weatherperson in KC and Spielberg did not actually shoot there. Having said that, for me the movie is at its best as a chase thriller — a sequence in which O’Connor escapes a remote farmhouse is particularly well-executed.

“Disclosure Day” is first and foremost just a lot of fun, a showcase for Spielberg’s gifts as a filmmaker and his longstanding collaborations with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and composer John Williams. The film is deeply interested in who knows what. There are longtime tightly held secrets being kept from the rest of us for whatever reason. Though the film is framed as a conspiracy thriller, Spielberg’s essential goodheartedness continually peeks out, as if he can only play at being hard-bitten for so long.

Where the film becomes less sure-footed is when it grabs for its bigger meaning, attempting to render something deeper from Spielberg’s longstanding fascination with aliens and what they might have to teach us.

The real disclosure of “Disclosure Day” turns out to be our own inability to listen: how everyone gets so wrapped up in themselves they often miss the larger picture. But the idea that the entire world could latch onto something together feels too far-fetched in our own current fractured news environment. That is likely less the fault of Spielberg and more one of ourselves. His career-spanning interest in aliens always brings him back to trying to better understand us.

Anticipation. Rumors. Anxiously scanning the horizon, hoping that a brilliant force will leave the masses forever changed. Yes, a new Steven Spielberg movie about close encounters with extraterrestrials is landing — and misses the mark.

“Disclosure Day” is a story of truth and feared consequences. A personality-free cybersecurity expert, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is on the run with evidence of little gray men arriving on our planet to a rude reception. The aliens are kind. Our species is barbaric. Wittily bruising us with that fact, Spielberg opens with a POV of a wrestler kicking the audience in the face. Welcome to Earth.

Elsewhere in America, a weathergirl named Margaret (Emily Blunt) breezes into her Kansas City studio, babbling up until the minute the news camera turns on, a bravura sequence that channels her restlessness, the station’s tempo and the film’s alarm that this ditz has just this morning been stricken with preternatural powers. (The cinematography and editing are by Janusz Kaminski and Sarah Broshar.) Locally, Margaret is known for announcing hailstorms with a sexy shimmy. Suddenly, she’s fluent in Russian, Korean and telepathy. Although she and her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), are a bad match, she’s giving everyone else life advice like an intergalactic Dear Abby.

When Margaret starts spouting alien-ese — spasms of gutteral clicks — on live TV, she and Jackson rush to the hospital for a brain scan followed by several suspicious men who claim to be with the FBI. Russell’s befuddled Jackson is as useless as a traffic cone but Blunt’s Margaret is a gas before the movie makes her go all glassy-eyed and solemn. Yet, the movie is less inspired by why she was chosen or how she feels about it than in dragging us back in time to the moment when it happened, which isn’t that interesting except for its resemblance to a Disney princess having a psychotic break. The CG animals and aliens look stiff, other than a nifty close-up of an eyeball. (Later, I did like how one alien appears to be wearing sportswear.)

Chasing both Daniel and Margaret around the Midwest is a deep-state company called Wardex that wants to steal back the proof in Daniel’s backpack, a heap of hard drives with footage of 70-plus years of extraterrestrial visitations. It’s a treat to see Spielberg enjoying staging this conspiratorial gossip in different film stocks, from the black-and-white noir of 1947 Roswell to the clinical security-camera look of today. Whatever Wardex does on a day-to-day basis is unclear (we just see video screens and lab equipment). But it acts all-powerful, seeming to know more about outer-space tech than its overseers at the Department of Defense.

The script is by David Koepp of the paranoid thriller “Black Bag” and Spielberg’s 2005 version of “War of the Worlds,” yet, this plot strand about private enterprise isn’t science fiction. Last year, in the unrelated UFO documentary “The Age of Disclosure,” current Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted that companies have a stronger institutional memory of “exotic materials” than any presidential administration: “The people in government who know where it came from originally — they’re long gone and their successors have no idea that it was there at all.” To add nationalistic insult to injury, the head of Wardex isn’t even American. He’s a Brit played by Colin Firth.

If anything, “Disclosure Day” isn’t paranoid enough. Clutching a mysterious tool the shape of a mouse coffin, Firth’s villain tracks Daniel’s location by mentally transplanting himself into another person’s body, changing the color of their pupils to his own icy blue. His gadget also makes his targets super sweaty. This laborious alien tactic leads to a few fun scenes but frankly feels old-fashioned when the omnipresent surveillance that Spielberg himself warned about nearly 25 years ago in “Minority Report” is now here with recording devices constantly tracking our faces, voices and movements just so we don’t have to dial phones, fetch sandwiches or talk to human drivers. Although his movie urged us against this 24/7 spyware future, we have since embraced the convenience.

I bring this up because “Disclosure Day’s” driving question is how humanity will react to life-altering information. (Not that the plot has much momentum — too many scenes end with the belief that ducking 10 feet out of view makes you invisible, with an antagonist simply giving up.) Daniel insists on total honesty: “People have a right to know the truth,” he says. His girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) doubts 8 billion people can handle his alien revelations. A Catholic, she’s alarmed that extraterrestrial intelligence could replace the concept of God, naively claiming that “religion holds society together.” Since when?

There’s some wan comedy in an early scene where these new-ish lovers debate the ethics of secrecy while revealing the skeletons they’ve been hiding from each other. Both have pasts you wouldn’t put on a Tinder profile. The script is glancingly empathetic to Jane’s moral turmoil but like Daniel, the film has made up its mind before the movie started. Narratively and logistically, Daniel’s whistleblowing escape limps along with a lack of suspense. Wardex doesn’t even bother to preemptively discredit Daniel in the public’s eye, which, given the two sentences of backstory we know about his character, would be easy.

Nattering in the background are broadcasts about the impending threat of global war at the hands of the United States, Russia and North Korea. Given that scary possibility, the risk that Daniel’s reveal could tip over the world order doesn’t seem that bad. Honestly, I’m dubious of the film’s certainty that folks even have the bandwidth to care about such news, let alone agree on what they’re seeing. The serious journalism Margaret aspires to do is splintering under our distrust of who controls the megaphones. Last month’s infodump of an Armed Forces report listing 209 sightings of unidentified objects was announced with a presidential tweet that “the people can decide for themselves.” I didn’t bother to click. Did you?

Getting information about these space invaders out leaves no time for taking the marvel of their existence in. Decades after Spielberg unveiled his signature shot — a face amazed at wonders we can’t see — he seems wearied by his awareness that today’s moment of revelation would look like a person staring down at their phone. When lens flares continually beam right at the screen, the whole movie feels like enlightenment under duress.

Where are the aliens from and why are they here? Who knows. “Disclosure Day” speeds around frantically, talking constantly and explaining little. Back in 1977, Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was a popcorn masterpiece of withheld information. Its quiet assurance that experts had a handle on flying saucers and a plan to meet them felt comforting. Here, Colman Domingo’s renegade intelligence operative also refuses to tell anyone anything, but all the unspoken beats just feel like plot holes. Mostly, his character builds what looks like a Hollywood set to reveal a truth he already suspects. That’s what Spielberg is doing too, but a film needs a sense of curiosity.

Instead, the wows come from good stagings of ordinary action: a car crash, a gripped crucifix, a hideout crowded with jostling, thrumming musical instruments. There’s a great train-track crossing sequence that’s also a vicious callback to Richard Dreyfuss’ epiphany in “Close Encounters.” Yet, I wanted to see more of the old Spielberg, the one who expressed awe in moments of silence rather than relentless motion.

That Spielberg has come full circle to his lifelong obsession with the sky had me convinced that this might be a secret sequel to “Close Encounters” beyond the droll joke that both Dreyfuss’ Roy and Blunt’s Margaret are shacked up with unsupportive blonds. They do share a universe; you’ll see a glimpse of what could pass for an outtake from Devils Tower, a.k.a. Mashed Potato Mountain, on one of Daniel’s hard drives. Still, I left underwhelmed. I didn’t need Dreyfuss to step off a spaceship gangplank and say, “I’m back.” I just needed “Disclosure Day” to have the same spark of intelligent life.