Steven Spielberg is eighty this year, and there’s no greater proof that some things you just don’t age out of: John Williams scores, aliens, and the tendency to occasionally go off the rails (in some cases literally) in the third act. Disclosure Day isn’t as personal as making a movie about your parents’ divorce, but it’s clear that it means a lot to Spielberg, who has sole story credit; it’s even more clear that he has a baseline belief in humanity that might not be borne out by the facts of reality. Disclosure Day is a wildly optimistic movie that comes off as more than a little naïve. It also shows that the man really does know how to make a movie, but maybe doesn’t always know how to finish one.

One day, weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The Devil Wears Prada 2) sees a cardinal and can suddenly understand people’s deepest desires. Elsewhere in the US, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor, Wake Up Dead Man) is on the run with information that his former employer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, TV’s Young Sherlock) is desperate to keep quiet. After Margaret speaks in an unknown dialogue on the air, Margaret and Daniel feel compelled to find one another while avoiding Scanlon, protecting Daniel’s girlfriend Jean (Eve Hewson, Jay Kelly) and liaising with the mysterious Hugo (Colman Domingo, TV’s Euphoria) on a series of disposable satellite phones.

Screenwriter and longtime Spielberg collaborator David Koepp (Cold Storage) understands that there is a lot of appeal in having disparate characters in separate scenarios that add up to a bigger picture. He also understands that eventually they have to intersect, but the problem is that every time that new elements intersect they take something away from each other. Ironically given the entire concept of the film, we’re better off not knowing some of the answers to this mystery.

Which is a pity because much of Disclosure Day’s early going is transcendent, Spielberg firing on cylinders previously unknown to man, beast, or extraterrestrial. Blunt has a certain hypnotic quality that generates warmth and intrigue, as she blossoms into understanding and makes wilder connections; O’Connor has an almost incredible sequence in a wheat field that means nothing in retrospect but feels significant at the time. The movie is suffused with light and excitement, even when it’s dingy and dangerous and O’Connor has to get out of yet another scrape.

And then the magic stops. You can almost feel it drain out of the movie as more and more things get piled on top of each other, then summarily dismissed when they’re no longer required. When you’d like to know more about something — why Domingo and Firth are playing their roles almost as if they’re former lovers who still have feelings for one another but know it can never be, despite Firth textually being a widower —you won’t find it out, but you will get subjected to some of the more egregious special effects of recent times, where even the child actors get the sheen of the uncanny valley on them. Spielberg can no longer sustain the trance state that he’s plunged us into because there’s such a discord between the “goodness” we’re being told that we’re witnessing versus the very real horror that’s playing out on the screen.

The final stretch of the movie is where everything completely falls apart, with a closing twenty to thirty minutes (it’s a long movie) that are so poorly judged that it’s difficult not to goggle at the screen. So little here makes sense, and the movie becomes otherworldly not in that we’re dealing with aliens but that Spielberg is suddenly presenting another world where no one acts like a human, broadcast media is king, and USB is the ultimate in technological achievement. Even more baffling is why you would cede so much of the climax to a character who we’ve never seen before, to whom we have absolutely no connection, when Blunt’s character herself literally serves that role? If anyone had trusted her to bring the movie home, at least some of the qualms that had developed in the lead up could have been quashed.

Disclosure Day accidentally ties in to modern right wing conspiracy campaigning; although the script comes down hard against Richard Nixon, Koepp takes pains to make clear that the shadowy organisation headed by Scanlon is a private entity completely devoid of political affiliation. Close call, because you wouldn’t want to accidentally say anything specific about humanity when you can simply contrast black ops with a hug box. This is a movie about faith and how assimilating new information challenges our most deeply held beliefs, but beyond the novelty and confusion of Spielberg making an explicitly Catholic first contact movie, there’s no real thesis other than the misplaced conviction that people are willing to pay for wifi on a plane.

You can argue that cynicism is tiresome and Spielberg’s brand of optimism should bring light to audiences across the world. The problem is that the brand of hope that Disclosure Day peddles is proven wrong in the real world on a daily basis. It is in this loss of touch with society that Disclosure Day loses touch with its characters, its world, and its thesis. The layers of irony that this inversion creates between the audience and the object means that the masterful intimacy that Spielberg had created is now permanently severed.

It’s happened many times before: a movie can be excellent up until the point that it’s simply not. Disclosure Day is not a movie of two halves, but rather an ephemeral feature that evaporates before the viewer’s eyes. The more it has to say, the less we have to take away. Spielberg’s 37th film is sweeping, exciting and breathtaking until it judders. Movies are about story, character, and plot, but they’re also about the experience. Disclosure Day is an exercise in erosion, the ride of your life disappearing around you until you’re left holding a steering wheel. In the end, Disclosure Day is not a case of what is, but mourning what once was, less than an hour before the credits rolled.

Disclosure Day opened in Australian cinemas on June 11, 2026.

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo

You could say that it’s not often we can an Absolute #1 these days, but Absolute Green Arrow, for all its amputation antics, was mere weeks ago, and a one shot off the back of this very Absolute Catwoman has already been announced. But let’s see what’s going on in this, the closest relative the Absolute line has to the Absolute Batman flagship.

Absolute Catwoman’s first and strongest act is marking itself separately from Absolute Batman. Selina’s adventures between these pages, save a flashback to her youth, are entirely in Europe. She has a penthouse, a Cat Cave, and a luxury villa. She has that lonesome life of a solo operator, so even if she is a little bit like an incarnation of mainline Bruce, she feels fresh. This is the story of a woman trying to retire on her 25th birthday, only to find that her former colleagues are after her for a McGuffin that she unwittingly took into her custody. That classic story.

Scott Snyder (who isn’t busy enough already) cowrites with Che Grayson, providing that link between worlds, a delicate baton touch of continuity and new world thrills.

Bengal’s art makes the book appear initially like an outgrowth of Nick Dragotta’s work on Absolute Batman, but cuter. Everything appears fairly dynamic for a piece where most everyone wears helmets across action scenes, although that may be because below the neckline they’re all basically wearing skin suits — it was a genius move to feature so many costume variants. At any rate, it’s a handsome book and the felinity never feels forced. You get the impression that Selina’s been having a lot more fun than Bruce lo these many years.

Because Catwoman’s solo adventures aren’t the most mainstream of DC (admittedly, there is a scale), her supporting cast are more obscure than many of the characters we’ve seen across other Absolute titles. That’s how we end up with Holly Robinson, who’s one of the greatest examples of resurrection in comic history (Ed Brubaker forgot that she was dead, and editorial somehow didn’t pick up on it), and another character I’ll continue to tiptoe around (there are so many members of the Bat family you can be forgiven for not having heard of some of them — or knowing them without having any idea who they are).

Admittedly Absolute Catwoman does expect you to have a base familiarity with Catwoman, with the reader filling in blanks they’re supposed to instinctively know, and not just from her brief appearances in Absolute Batman. But that’s the appeal of the Absolute universe: it’s a twisting or an inversion of what we already know so well. Everything in Absolute has been worth reading so far — even Absolute Green Lantern! — but you’re doing yourself a disservice if Absolute is the only DC you read.

Go out there, immerse yourself, indulge. DC K.O. let us see Ambush Bug! It’s not a bad time to be a comic reader at all.

Ryan Levine signed up for Marooned not just because he’s been watching since he was 10 years old, but to pay his sister’s medical bills. What he did not bargain on was being instantly smitten with his handsome tribemate, Cole. Ryan has to spend the next month of his life trying not to get too close to Cole while also battling it out with sixteen other contestants for one million dollars.

It’s no secret that the show Marooned is a blatant Survivor clone; after all, the genre mostly works by incorporating existing formats with the serial numbers filed off. However, Marooned has almost no points of difference between itself and the real Survivor apart from the fact that, as presented, Chalfin has made it into an incredibly dull game. This is not helped by the fact that the host, Alex Crawford, has dialogue taken almost verbatim from Jeff Probst, and much of the terminology – immunity challenge, Tribal Council, Jury, Hidden Immunity Idol – is lifted wholesale. Unlike Probst, Crawford is a non-entity. Say what you will about Probst (and there are many, many things you can say about him), the man has personality.

The supporting cast are from central casting, including Ryan’s number one ally, Rhonda, a wise Black mother who calls him “chile”, and Marina, a Latina tribe member whose dialogue, when she has it, is peppered with random Spanish words. One of these Spanish words or phrases turned up no result when googled and, while this may be changed in time for the publication date, it is not inspiring. Rhonda and Marina get off lightly compared to the rest of the cast, who are interchangeable names without anything to define them other than being on a television contest.

What Chalfin ultimately treats us to is a one sided recap of a particularly uneventful season of a long running competition. Without access to any of the other contestants you get no real sense of what’s going on because Ryan himself is unwilling to engage with what he’s doing: when there’s no challenge happening, there’s a lot of hanging around at camp. Confessionals seem to be only recorded once a day, in the morning; Ryan has an infuriating habit of completely tuning out at Tribal Council, which you absolutely have to be on top of if you stand any chance of winning the game.

This drab character only has eyes for Cole, because Cole is, we are told, attractive. In a hilarious dropping of the ball from production, he is revealed under cover of nightfall to be bisexual. That and his penchant for using seasoning to make food taste good (he’s a chef) are the two things that we learn about him. Then Ryan can moon over him while going through the motions of competing in a battle royale that he seems increasingly divorced from the outcome of, even if he needs the pay out to settle his debts.

Marooned tries to be two things, and it succeeds at neither of them. It’s far from the first romance novel set in and around a televised reality competition, and it does nothing to differentiate itself from the crowd (to paraphrase another, better, novel, “even gay” is not enough). Someone with an even rudimentary understanding of television production will instantly be struck by the lack of verisimilitude. In an increasingly crowded market, discerning readers could throw a sand bag and very likely land on a better book than Marooned.

An Advanced Reader Copy was provided by Rising Action for review.

Stuart Douglas has written two excellent novels to date, but they were undeniably heavy. Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, with their distinctive names, are not exactly laugh riots. Douglas’ third novel, John of John, continues the trend of being named for a character, but it has a slightly lighter spring in its step. Very serious matters happen between these pages, and yet our titular protagonist won’t let it get him down.

When John-Calum Macleod is informed that his grandmother is dying, he returns to his home island of Harris to help maintain the household with his taciturn and devout father, John. But grandmother Ella doesn’t seem to need Cal, and John only wants Cal to do exactly as he’s told. Discouraged by his lack of success on the mainland, Cal finds himself wondering if things will be any better for him on Harris or if his business is going to inevitably become everyone else’s once more and if what little liberation he has claimed for himself will have to be tamped back down. Despite their diametrically opposed beliefs and lifestyles, Cal and John might have more in common than either suspects.

Set in the late nineties, John of John is redolent with detail that could only be provided with someone intimately familiar with the Scottish textile industry of the time: the licensing involved in weaving, the specific “signature” that each loom bears, and the effort that it takes to survive on a depressed island. John of John is a very specific novel, and the way that Stuart crystallises his time and place is an essential part of its enjoyment.

John of John is Stuart’s first foray into a novel with multiple viewpoints, providing separate stories for both Johns. We are privy to knowledge about father and son that each hopes that the other will never find out; a split-level multigenerational gambit that pays off in ways that neither understands. John is a tyrant of a patriarch, but in a way that we’re able to comprehend and develop sympathy for, even as certain actions surely condemn him. At times, John seems more important than Cal, but that’s the beauty of John of John: each part is defined by the other.

Ella, the lynchpin of the family, and unwilling host of John, is as much if not more of an outcast as Cal. Her Glaswegian nature marks her as more Other than a boy born and raised on the island, no matter how different Cal might be. Surrounded by people who exclude her through use of the Gaelic tongue (which heads each chapter), Ella presents another aspect of grappling with identity in a hostile place when you’re From Away. This trinity forms the novel, but Stuart has many more elements to recommend the piece. 

The supporting cast embody the spirit of a small island in Scotland without stooping to caricature.  They populate the novel and bring it to life, preventing the Macleods or Ella from existing in an empty expanse. The MacInnes brothers could have been quaint parochial archetypes in the hands of another author, but here they provide the backbone to John’s story. The Macdonald clan, from promising Isla to the constantly thwarted Doll, similarly inform Cal’s own experience. Stuart has endowed all of these characters with a credibility that brings John of John to life. The book feels vital and lived in: a piece on the cusp of a new era for Scotland, for better and worse.

Though this is a novel more of person and place than plot, John of John is a “year in the life” type of novel, and time marches through it. Informed by the history of the place and its people, the changing perspectives of a father, son, and grandmother as they learn more of each other, it’s not about the event but the development. Things happen here, both within the characters and without. There’s a flow and a give and take, but it’s never strictly about what happens. The infinite tiny shifts that move us through our days bring these people to a conclusion that is not inevitable so much as it is understandable. No one is as they were at the beginning of John of John, and while they don’t escape unscathed, it’s fascinating to watch them get there.

If it proves nothing else, John of John shows in short order that Douglas Stuart has not simply written the same book three times. The agency granted to these characters that was denied the others opens their worlds up, even as various strictures bring them down. This is a carefully constructed novel, right down to the cover: though it may be rain spattered, it depicts light emerging from beyond the clouds. Though undeniably wet, John of John allows the reader that most elusive of emotions granted by books: optimism. Stuart’s third novel is his most accomplished yet, and demands to be relished.

An Advanced Reader Copy was provided by Grove Press for review.

What happens when the loose cannon who gets results for stupid chiefs is used by a stupid chief to get a result? Harry Bosch, fresh off helping his half-brother with a prosecution case, is called in to investigate a suicide as a personal favour, and avoid politicking. At the same time, he’s also investigating a more than twenty-year-old cold case which turns up the DNA of someone who couldn’t have been the murderer because they were only a child at the time.

A lot happened to Bosch in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and he’s reeling from all of it. He has so much fall out to deal with that it’s a surprise Connelly doesn’t describe him as glowing in the dark. Dual case wielding is a net positive in this instance because it keeps him busy, and the cold case is less prosaic than the suicide. Both give him a chance to let down and be let down by his fresh partner David Chu, first introduced in Nine Dragons, whose continued presence was predicated by the abrupt ending of that adventure. Moreso than Maddie, Chu is utilised here to expose Bosch’s harsh exterior and soft underbelly. It’s a strong dynamic.

The Drop does, admittedly, descend into serial killer bombast, but Bosch attracts that sort of thing. The tightrope between the extreme and the mundane — the suicide investigation is resolved by solid, if muddy, police work — is handled well, and even allows Bosch to pursue a new love interest, and one that’s not wholly inappropriate this time.

Yet the moral ambiguity of The Drop is slightly too ambiguous: it’s realistic that Bosch is an idealisation of what a police officer can achieve (albeit one who breaks way too many rules to trust in real life), but are we expected to believe that he would feel bad about preventing a murder, even of one of the foulest villains he’s ever encountered? And just how much of the cold case investigation was fed to him? Can Bosch trust Michael Connelly anymore? No, these books aren’t that meta.

If you’ve managed to read 24 Michael Connelly novels, 15 of which were pure Bosch (and a very good argument could be made that The Reversal was a Bosch novel), you know whether you like the man. If you like Bosch, The Drop is some good Bosch.

In the literary world, hyper fixations and stories written to entertain your friends can be noble pursuits: famously, Frankenstein and The Vampyre, the source of much modern literary vampire mythology,  both sprang from the same friendly competition in a winter of discontent. The Ministry of Time, born of 2020 isolation and  a fixation on The Terror, is no Frankenstein, but it reads exactly as if it was written for Kaliane Bradley’s friends. 

Whether it succeeds is partly up to how likely you would consider yourself Bradley’s friend, and partly up to how game you are to read fan fiction about a real historical figure that the author is clearly exceptionally horny for. The Ministry of Time drips with lust at the expense of intrigue, so how you take it really depends on which book you want to read.

In the near future, time travel has been discovered and is run out of a facility in London by the newly created Ministry of Time. Our unnamed narrator, the daughter of a Cambodian refugee, is brought on by the Ministry to help acclimatise one of several “expats”, people plucked from time on the grounds that they were going to to die anyway, to the modern era. The narrator is assigned Commander Graham Gore, late of the Erebus and the Franklin expedition, and she is immediately smitten by him. There’s some light intrigue in the background — is there a mole in the Ministry? who is this Brigadier who keeps showing up and asking probing questions? — but much of that is subsumed by the narrator’s unbridled lust.

The normal things that you’d expect in a time traveling fish out of water story are present in The Ministry of Time: Gore is fascinated by modern technology, disapproves of cinema, and is handsome in a way that the men of the 21st century are simply incapable – albeit shorter. His closest displaced companions are more interested in other aspects of the time, like the freedom to be homosexual and not die of the plague (admittedly, two major perks if you’re both inclined that way and don’t want to die). Other expats are less capable of being cured of their bigotries or, quite simply, are not as interesting to Bradley.

Towards the end, far too late to count as a real third act, Bradley starts suggesting that the vague intrigue that has been sprinkled lightly throughout might be leading somewhere. And it does, but in a way that has been really underdeveloped all throughout. The narrator is fundamentally uncurious about the Ministry and what they do because she is so unbearably besotted that nothing matters to her beyond Gore. Realistically the narrator should be on permanently high alert because her position is unprecedented and there’s much to learn and there’s the occasional political assassination. But she’s not. She doesn’t care at all, and so the reader is barely exposed to the actual nuts and bolts of this profession except to learn that Gore is as good at the job that he gives himself as the narrator is bad at her own. Often The Ministry of Time feels like reading the story of a janitor at MI6, except the janitor doesn’t show up to work most days and when they do they spend most of it cataloguing and analysing micro-aggresions in minute detail, not noticing that a covert nuclear war is being waged and countered in the foreground.

Given that this book is written as a retrospective letter to an unknown recipient, when you read about those micro-aggressions they’re couched in terms of “I should have answered this way” or “that was the moment it all went wrong for me.” The narrator only really worries about how she talks to her female colleagues, and that’s almost exclusively through the prism of race. This is when The Ministry of Time swings towards the didactic and it does not do either of its recipients, co-worker Simellia and big boss Adela, any favours. If anything it hardens the audience against them even as the narrator expresses her regret, and it perhaps says more about professional gender politics than may have been intended.

Beyond this, apart from writing the book as a bodice ripper with limited bodices for the ripping, Bradley has a tendency towards the memeish in her writing. If you paraphrase the “normal to want and possible to achieve” tweet in your text without comment, it feels like a failure of the imagination. Yet the end matter of this edition suggests that The Ministry of Time is funny. Humour, like time itself, is subjective. The standard issue fish out of water stuff combined with a minor case of online poisoning works against this book’s favour.

Yet for its many flaws, The Ministry of Time wants to be a good book; it just wants the reader to do more work than it has done itself. For all the tweeness, Gore, Arthur and Maggie are somewhat charming and it’s quite possible to care for them. The narrator is nothing if not accommodating, and acknowledges her tunnel vision. There’s a deep mechanics of time travel that is, again, only superficially touched on, and no real room or call for a sequel. The intrigue, though half-baked by the time it emerges, is genuinely intriguing, there’s just not enough of a breadcrumb trail and the nature of the loop is nearly entirely unexplored. It’s actually bizarre how much the narrator does not care and where her priorities lie, because Bradley really could have had it both ways – particularly if someone who had used the internet had edited it before thrusting it upon an unsuspecting, although remarkably receptive, public. The strengths of The Ministry of Time are not as multifarious as its flaws, but they do elevate it into something somewhat worth reading.

If the imbalance of The Ministry of Time does not bother you – if you’re fine with something that is structured as largely slice-of-life material with a smattering of drama towards the end – then it can be quite successful. A romance-forward time travel novel can still be quite weighty thematically, but The Ministry of Time comes across as gossamer thin. Almost all of the thought-provocation that goes with its tripartite elements — time travel, intrigue, romance — is left off the page until almost the last second. With no time to breathe or grow, we’re left with what little we’re given. This won awards and presumably made Bradley’s friends very happy in a cold and dark time. Maybe that’s enough.

THE MINISTRY OF TIME | By Kaliane Bradley | Hachette Australia | 368 Pages

The whole world is astroturfed, we know this much. It’s how I Think We’ve Been Here Before ended up in my lap, probably – it’s published by Lake Union Press, which is owned by Amazon, and it was promoted as one of the Goodreads books of the year despite being published in December 2024. Without the need to feed the gamification ending that is modern Goodreads, many readers likely would not have even thought to try I Think We’ve Been Here Before. It’s very low key, but it’s also entirely divorced from human nature in a way that never rings true, despite the elevated concept.

In October, news reports announce that an astronomical event will see the world destroyed by Christmas time. A family in a small Canadian town are in peril: the patriarch is inured to the concept because he has a terminal illness anyway; the matriarch can’t reach her daughter in Berlin; the daughter, unable to book a flight home, refuses to answer her phone. All the while, they have an intense feeling of deja vu, but surely the world hasn’t ended before.

Krause has two huge deal breakers that make the book near impossible to take: Nora’s inability to answer her mother’s calls for two weeks discounts most sympathies the reader is able to have; a twelve year old disappears without trace for three weeks and his parents only marginally freak out. If this was a non-apocalyptic book they’d be apoplectic; that global doom is imminent means you think they would be more desperate for the reunion.

Nobody says that people need to face the end of the world in panic; there’s a lot to recommend taking it in your stride, but who’s to says how any of us would tackle the inevitable? But Krause has preserved her characters in a sort of amber sludge where they don’t care about anything, particularly. It’s not nihilism, but an indifference that is neither credible nor distressing. Krause’s touch is so gentle that for the most part you can only feel either contempt or disdain towards.

It’s one thing for the people of a small Canadian town where nothing ever happens to be this way (if anything, they should care more), and another for the streets of Berlin that are portrayed as if they have almost no one in them, without ever explaining where anyone has gone.

This said, I can be a sucker for ends of the world when an author is brave enough to commit to them. I Think We’ve Been Here Before does, in fact, have an ending that is both stronger than anything that came before it while still feeling like it was informed by what came before it. It’s not enough, but it’s a valiant effort on Krause’s part.

I Think We’ve Been Here Before has the kernel of an interesting idea hiding in it, but Krause never really allows it to germinate, and it has an artificial air that is so intoxicating to people who enjoy reading books where the characters aren’t easily mistaken for humans. The word “cozy” has been bandied about to describe this sort of fuzzy hug of a book divorced from reality, but readers would do well remember that coziness can be suffocating. There’s no breathing room in this novel, but at the very least it thematically hits the mark for an end of year read.

Free yourself from the chains of Goodreads challenges.