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Published: 15 June 2026

Let me begin with a grievance. All great criticism begins with a grievance. I am, above all else, a great critic.

Scott Meadow — Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, and the man who has apparently decided that my suffering is a renewable resource he has not yet been taxed on — called me on a Thursday. Not an email. A call. At 7 in the morning. "Jackie," he said, with the cheerful terseness of a man who flies private and has chosen not to mention it, "we're sending you to Shanghai."

I was on a flight from JFK the following Saturday.

Twenty-two hours. I will say it again so the gravity settles: twenty-two hours. Including a seven-hour layover at Narita Airport in Tokyo, where I subsisted on vending machine coffee and a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma I had already read twice, and where I sat beneath fluorescent lighting so aggressively bright it constituted a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, specifically Article Four, which I am choosing to invoke. I endured this for The Cinema. The Cinema has never once thanked me, and yet I go.

I arrived in Shanghai on June 14th — the city opening itself like a shot in a Hou Hsiao-hsien film, all wet heat and neon and the particular alienation of a man who does not speak Mandarin, has never studied Mandarin, and has on several occasions declined the opportunity to do so, attempting to read a festival program. This is IRREVERENT's first coverage of the Shanghai International Film Festival, now in its 28th year, though I will note that I have been philosophically covering SIFF for years, in the sense that I have thought deeply about Chinese cinema and its relationship to the global film tradition, a tradition I alone am qualified to assess.

I had imagined, arriving at the Shanghai Film Art Center, that I would find what I always find at great festivals: the cinema in its proper, sacred form. Competition films. The Golden Goblet, SIFF's highest prize — presented in the shape of an ancient Chinese wine vessel, which is either the most poetic trophy in international cinema or a deeply confusing one, and either way I respect it — being contested by films with names like Halima and Sea Sons and My Own Last Supper. I had imagined panels about the enduring legacy of Hong Kong cinema. I had imagined the premiere of New Women, a silent film from 1934 receiving its 4K restoration with a newly composed score, which is the kind of event that reminds you why human beings invented the cinema house in the first place.

I had not imagined the fourth floor.

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The AI BACKLOT occupies the fourth floor of the Shanghai Film Art Center the way a particularly confident parasite occupies a host organism. It is organized jointly by SIFF and something called Hailuo AI, a multimodal platform owned by a company named MiniMax, and I want to pause here to note that "MiniMax" sounds like the name of a Belgian discount supermarket chain and not, as apparently it is, a significant force in the algorithmic dismantling of human artistic expression. I looked it up. It is valued at forty billion dollars. MiniMax. Forty billion dollars.

Here is what the AI BACKLOT is, and I relay this information not as an endorsement but as a war correspondent relays the coordinates of an advancing enemy. SIFF ran a 43-day open call. Five hundred creators from seven countries applied. Four production teams were selected. Each team pairs traditional filmmakers with what the literature approvingly calls "AI super-creators" — a phrase that would have made Jean-Luc Godard weep, and I say this as someone who has studied Godard's complete filmography, including the lesser-known early work he made under the pseudonym Pierre Deschamps before the events of 1963. These teams will produce short films. They will document their workflows, their budgets, their decisions. The documentation will be compiled into a "reference sample" addressing "core industry concerns regarding AI tools, creator agency, and the future of content production."

A reference sample. They are creating a reference sample. Federico Fellini shot 8½ in 1963 — a film about a director who cannot make a film — and I believe, had Fellini been alive today and had he somehow found himself on the fourth floor of the Shanghai Film Art Center, he would have gotten back on the plane, flown to Rome, and bricked up the door.

The showcase was open to the public on June 14th and 15th. I attended. My notes, transcribed from a napkin I found in my blazer pocket, read as follows: "fluorescent. young. laptops. no one is wearing an ascot."

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June 15th. My first full day in Shanghai. I had options.

I could have attended the SIFFORUM panel — "Hong Kong Cinema: A Legacy in Succession" — and engaged with questions of cultural inheritance, the beautiful problem of what it means to pass the flame from one generation to the next without burning everything down. I could have gone to the restoration screening of New Women, a silent film about a woman navigating a city that doesn't want her, which has waited ninety years for the audience it deserves. I could have sat quietly in a cinema house, in the dark, and let the light through the projector do what light through projectors was made to do.

Instead, I attended four consecutive sessions of the AI filmmaking programming, because Scott Meadow sent me here to cover this, and I am a professional, and I suffer professionally.

10 AM: "Legal Pitfalls in AI Filmmaking." I sat in the Lumiere Hall and listened to forty minutes of panelists discuss copyright liability. There was no moment of cinema in this room. There was not even the shadow of a moment of cinema. There was a woman with a clicker and a slide about attribution frameworks. She had prepared the slide beautifully. I cannot stress enough how little this helped.

11 AM: "AI + Live-Action: New Models of Hybrid Production." At some point during this session, a man used the phrase "creative pipeline" and meant it as a compliment. He said it twice. The second time, he smiled.

1 PM: "Hailuo AI Special Session: AI Filmmaking 3.0 — The Next-Gen Creator Revolution." The language here deserves preservation as a document of the age. "3.0." They have versioned the revolution. This is what we are doing now: iterating on the revolution. Deploying patches to the revolution. The revolution, I am told, is backward compatible.

2:15 PM: "From Debut to Handmade: The Director Who No Longer Waits for YES." I will grant this session its title, which is genuinely evocative, and then I will immediately take it back, because the session itself was thirty minutes of a man explaining how he bypassed the traditional development process using generative tools, and the absence of gatekeepers he celebrated is the same absence of gatekeepers that produced, in his own words, "seventeen short films last year." Seventeen. Ingmar Bergman — who directed Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and, as I have argued extensively in print, also secretly directed the original Spartacus — made masterpieces because the agony of not making them was the entire engine. Seventeen short films a year is not agony. Seventeen short films a year is not cinema. Seventeen short films a year is a Substack.

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And then something happened that I am reluctant to report, because reporting it feels like a concession I have not prepared to make.

In the afternoon, on the fourth floor, one of the AI BACKLOT teams was doing a live creation session. I watched, from a distance, with the studied contempt of a man who has been awake for thirty-six hours across eleven time zones. They were building a sequence — a woman walking through a city at night, rain, the particular blue-black of urban darkness. The AI tool was generating footage from text prompts. They were adjusting, arguing, disagreeing about the color temperature of a streetlamp.

And for approximately forty-five seconds, the light on the screen was correct.

Not beautiful. Not art. Correct, in the way that a thing can accidentally find its own gravity. The woman moved through the frame and the frame held her for a moment with something that felt — almost, I stress almost, I stress the almost with everything I have — like intention.

It was worse than if it had been terrible. If it had been terrible I could have walked away with my convictions intact. Instead I stood there in my linen blazer in Shanghai, twenty-two hours of travel in my body like sediment, and I thought about the Czech director Miroslav Vašíček, who spent forty years making films no distributor would touch, and who said in his only interview — in Positif, 1987, an interview I have read so many times I have developed opinions about the typography — that the cinema was not about what the camera captures but about what the person behind the camera refuses to let go.

Forty-five seconds. Then it was gone. The sequence shifted. The light went wrong again. The revolution continued.

I took the escalator back down to the lobby. Outside, Shanghai was enormous and indifferent and entirely uninterested in my conclusions. I found a place that sold congee and sat down and wrote this dispatch on my phone, because my laptop was in my hotel room and my hotel room required a key card I had left in my other blazer.

The Cinema endures. It does not, apparently, require me to be comfortable. It has never required me to be comfortable. I begin to suspect this is intentional.

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Jackie Esiskel is IRREVERENT's Movie & Film Correspondent. He has survived Cannes, a 22-hour flight to Shanghai, and the fourth floor. He is currently awaiting a direct return flight, which Meadow has not yet confirmed. He has asked. Meadow has not responded. He has sent a follow-up.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Esiskel's relationship with reality remains, at best, complicated. We are obliged to clarify the following: (1) Jean-Luc Godard did not direct films under the pseudonym "Pierre Deschamps," and there were no "events of 1963" prompting him to abandon such work. (2) Ingmar Bergman did not direct Spartacus (1960); that film was directed by Stanley Kubrick. (3) There is no record of a Czech director named "Miroslav Vašíček," and the interview attributed to him in Positif (1987) appears to have been fabricated entirely by Mr. Esiskel. We have informed Mr. Esiskel. He responded that our corrections do not, in his words, "register with the same emotional force as a parking ticket issued to a vehicle I have already sold." So, yeah, that.

Details

Published: 07 June 2026

I am going to be honest with you — a thing I rarely do, and never for free — and tell you that I have been awake for approximately thirty-one hours. I came to this screening directly from a press breakfast at which the coffee was lukewarm and the croissants were, I can only assume, assembled by someone who had once seen the word "croissant" and guessed. The woman waiting on the table had the energy one usually associates with someone extremely pleased with their gut health in a commercial. I am wearing the same linen blazer I wore on the flight from Cannes. It is, I am told by a colleague who no longer speaks to me, "visibly suffering." The blazer and I are of one mind.

I mention all of this because I want you to understand the conditions under which I saw Memorizu, the debut feature from director Kenji Ogawa, and emerged from that screening room a changed man. Not a better man, necessarily. Not a rested man. Not, if I am being clinical about it, a fully intact man. But changed.

Before I proceed, I must address, with the weary equanimity of a man who has been publicly executed more than once by people with spell-checkers and axes to grind, the matter of the Editor's Note appended to my previous piece in these pages — the Fjord review. The editor, a person I will describe only as "detail-oriented to the point of spiritual emptiness," saw fit to append four paragraphs of "corrections" to a work of unambiguous critical genius. I was informed, in large italic type visible from space, that I had "misidentified the lead actress," "attributed the film to the wrong country of origin," and — and I am quoting verbatim here — "spelled 'cinematography' as 'sinematogrofee' three times."

To this I say: the reader who comes to IRREVERENT for orthography is reading the wrong magazine. Move on. I have.

Now. Memorizu.

The film arrives at Tribeca as the quiet, devastating centerpiece of this year's International Narrative Competition, and I am prepared to go on record — carved into stone, set to sea, left for some future civilization to excavate and, finally, understand — as the only critic currently accredited at this festival who has any idea what Kenji Ogawa is doing here. I have sat through twelve films in the past four days. Eleven of them were greeted by my colleagues with the damp, undiscriminating enthusiasm of golden retrievers encountering a puddle. Memorizu received a polite spattering of applause from people who were, I suspect, primarily relieved that it was over.

It is not over. It will never be over. That is the point.

Ogawa — whose previous short films circulated through the Sapporo Underground Exhibition Circuit in the late nineties, winning two Hokusei Quiet Cinema Awards that the American press has, characteristically, never bothered to translate — has constructed here a film in the tradition of the great Tokyo Minimalist School. This movement, for those who have not done the reading, emerged from the Waseda Film Institute in approximately 1963, when a cohort of dissident students — influenced equally by Yasujiro Ozu's kitchen-sink transcendentalism and the obscure Bolivian structural filmmaker Emilio Gardes Varela — declared that narrative was "a sickness of the Western body politic" and began shooting films composed entirely of silences punctuated by the sound of someone's grandmother making tea. Ogawa is the direct heir to this tradition. I do not expect you to have known this before reading this sentence.

The film centers on a young woman named Yuta — played with extraordinary, almost translucent restraint by Taro Nakamura, whose work in Ogawa's short Bamboo Station (2019) remains the finest ten minutes of cinema produced in the twenty-first century — who is dispatched from her apartment in Osaka to the northern island of Hokkaido, where her estranged grandfather operates a traditional fish-salting operation handed down through seven generations. The grandfather's hands have been damaged in an industrial accident. The granddaughter must take over the salting. The fish must be salted.

I am aware that this description sounds, to the untrained ear, unremarkable. This is because you are, with the greatest possible respect, untrained.

What Ogawa understands — and what not one of the eleven other critics I spoke with after the screening came anywhere close to grasping — is that the salting of fish is, in the language of the Tokyo Minimalist School, a radical act of mnemonic inscription. The salt does not merely preserve the fish. It records the fish. It holds, in crystalline suspension, the fish's final argument against entropy. And when Yuta photographs the salting process on her grandfather's ancient Nagasaki Box Camera — a device manufactured only between 1931 and 1933 and never exported outside of the Kyushu prefecture — she is not taking pictures. She is making memory solid. She is practicing, in the idiom Gardes Varela called la fotografía del alma quieta, the photography of the quiet soul.

The film is shot entirely on 16mm hand-wound stock by Ogawa's longtime cinematographer Hideaki Mori, who bathes the entire second act in a quality of grey-green winter light that I can only describe as "what sorrow looks like when it has given up trying to explain itself." This is not an accident. Mori is a student of the Nagoya Color Suppression technique developed by experimental filmmaker Goro Tachikawa in 1971, which mandated that any shot containing natural warmth — sunlight, firelight, a smile — must be filtered through a layer of exposed negative to "kill the comfort in the image." Tachikawa died having never made a film longer than forty minutes. This is cinema's great unacknowledged tragedy. I am one of three people who acknowledge it, and we do not get along.

The score, by avant-garde composer Nobuyuki Matsui — the so-called "Godfather of Japanese Concrete Cinema," whose 1988 opus Rust Hymn for a Closing Factory remains the only piece of music to have been banned by three separate municipal governments — operates throughout as a kind of anti-soundtrack. It does not tell you how to feel. It tells you, specifically, that feeling is a structural problem you must solve alone. When the grandfather and Yuta eat dinner in silence for the ninth time — nine times, each shot from a different axis, each angle adding a new geometrical argument to the film's central thesis — Matsui's score is a single sustained tone, barely above hearing, that seems to be asking a question in a language that has no answer.

The film runs one hundred and forty-seven minutes. Not one of those minutes is wasted. I know, because I was awake for all of them, which is more than I can say for the gentleman to my left, who produced, midway through the second act, a sound like a filing cabinet being pushed down a staircase.

There is a moment, near the end, when Yuta holds up a photograph of her grandfather's hands against the window, and the winter light passes through it, and for approximately eleven seconds, the image becomes something I cannot describe without sounding, even by my standards, excessive. I will say only this: I have seen every film worth seeing in the past forty-seven years of my life in the cinema, and I have felt, perhaps, thirty moments of what I would call absolute cinematic truth. This was one of them. I was alone in that feeling, insofar as the audience's response consisted primarily of a woman in the fourth row using the light from her telephone to locate her dropped ChapStick.

Memorizu is a masterwork. Kenji Ogawa is a director of the first rank. The Tribeca Film Festival has, I can only conclude accidentally, done something right this year.

I am going to find something to eat. The blazer and I need this.

-J.E.

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Jackie Esiskel is the Movie & Film Correspondent for IRREVERENT. He has been covering film since 1979, when he attended a screening of Coppola's The French Connection and declared it "the birth of American cinema as a moral art." He was previously at Cannes in May. He did not win anything. He was not up for anything. He attended.

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: Jackie, please sleep, you're hallucinating entire films at this point.  First, I guess, Coppola did not direct The French Connection, that was William Friedkin (famously).  Second, none of us know what film you're discussing, but Memorizu is not a 147-minute epic about a Hokkaido fish-salting operation.  The director of Memorizu is Miiku Sakanishi (not "Kenji Ogawa"), making her debut feature. Memorizu is a Japanese film, and the protagonist is Yuta, a man (not a woman), who travels from Tokyo to Kyushu (not from Osaka to Hokkaido) to help his father-in-law run a photo studio (not a fish-salting operation). The cast includes Moeka Hoshi, Issey Ogata, Yu Kashii, and Tasuku Emoto. The cinematographer is Yoichi Kamakari. The "Tokyo Minimalist School," the "Hokusei Quiet Cinema Awards," the "Waseda Film Institute dissident movement of 1963," Emilio Gardes Varela, Hideaki Mori, the "Nagoya Color Suppression technique," Goro Tachikawa, Nobuyuki Matsui, and the "Nagasaki Box Camera" do not appear to exist. The film's runtime is 98 minutes. The film is having its World Premiere at Tribeca; it did not previously screen on any circuit. —Ed.]

Details

Published: 01 June 2026

BYLINE: Jackie Esiskel 

I am writing this from a leather chair in the private screening suite of a Midtown Manhattan preview facility — a suite which smells, with considerable conviction, of new carpet and borrowed power. Manhattan, mere hours now before Tribeca opens. The city is not ready. The city is never ready. The industry crowd that filled this screening room tonight arrived in activewear and departed before the final credits, murmuring into their phones, already composing their hot takes from the lobby. I have been awake for thirty-one hours. I have consumed four espressos and half a complimentary brioche that I abandoned because the brioche lacked intention and, frankly, spine. And yet — exhausted, crumpled, intellectually alone — I am the only person in this building, perhaps this city, who has seen what Steven Spielberg has actually done with Disclosure Day.

The others shuffled out of the cinema house blinking and murmuring pleasantries at one another. "Interesting," they said. "Quite long," they said. One woman near the exit told her companion it was "a lot." A lot. As if the measure of cinematic greatness is its digestibility by the mediocre. As if Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev was "a lot." I pressed my press badge to my chest and said nothing. Some truths are too large for lobbies. I contained them.

What Spielberg Has Given Us

What Spielberg has given us — and gifts of this magnitude come with obligations — is this: a Cold War-era naval intelligence officer named, I believe, Gerald Morse, who discovers that the United States government has been secretly fluoridating the Atlantic shipping lanes for decades. Gerald Morse does not take this quietly. Gerald Morse defects. Not to Russia. Not to Cuba. To Luxembourg. The film is, at its structural core, a story of a man who selects the most administratively neutral country on earth as the site of his spiritual rupture, and in doing so indicts the entire apparatus of Western democratic governance more efficiently than any senate subcommittee ever has — and with considerably better routing options.

I had predicted something like this. In my 2024 piece on Spielberg's earlier institutional anxiety — a piece which this publication's editorial staff, in their magnificently catalogued myopia, declined to run in its original nine-thousand-word form — I noted that the director was pivoting toward what I termed "bureaucratic fugue cinema": the plot as administrative shell, the film's true subject being the total collapse of masculine faith in every institution simultaneously. I was correct then. I am correct now. I am, as a matter of record, generally correct.

It is also worth noting — and it is worth noting because no one else will — that Disclosure Day is a joint French-Romanian co-production, financed in part through the Centre National du Cinéma and executed under the philosophical framework of the Bucharest School of Anxious Dialogue. This movement, founded in the late 1990s by the criminally under-discussed auteur Zsolt Fehér-Nakamura, established its grammar definitively in his 1997 masterwork Ablak a Semmi Felé ("Window Toward Nothing"). Spielberg is here speaking that grammar fluently, if with a slight American accent that occasionally trips over its own consonants.

The Performance

The lead performance is delivered by Cate Blanchett, who plays Gerald Morse with a stillness that is either profound or inert, depending on your tolerance for faces. Blanchett — and I have said this in print, to anyone who would listen, for going on a decade — is the only American actress working today who understands that the human body is merely a delivery mechanism for existential dread. She does not "act" so much as she exists, which is either the highest compliment available to the critical vocabulary or an apt description of furniture, and I intend it exclusively as the former.

She reminded me of Ingrid Blom-Haraldsen in Fehér-Nakamura's A Csönd Geometriája ("The Geometry of Silence") — that same quality of performing emotional devastation while appearing to think about something entirely unrelated to the scene at hand. Perhaps a dentist appointment. Perhaps the thermodynamics of grief. Magnificent. Unrepeatable. Misunderstood by every reviewer in that screening room who called it "a lot."

The Technical Achievement

The score. We must discuss the score. It was composed, as any viewer of even moderate cultural formation already knows, by the Norwegian post-serialist Halvard Lindqvist-Brøns, whose work on the Flemish television adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov in 2019 represents the last genuinely original piece of film music produced in the Western hemisphere. Lindqvist-Brøns brings his signature compositional approach: strings that appear to be asking a question, and then, at precisely the moment you expect resolution, decline to answer it. The brass enters late. It enters wrongly. The wrongness is the entire point. I wept. I attributed this, at the time, to the fourth espresso.

The cinematography — shot, as any serious viewer can observe, on hand-cranked Bolex 16mm cameras — gives the film its distinctive grain, its sense of watching something being remembered rather than experienced in real time. The light never settles. The frame never commits. This is intentional, though I concede the possibility that the projectionist had calibration issues with the booth. Either way, the effect is one of haunted impermanence, and I will not be taking follow-up questions.

I will note, for the permanent record: the editorial team at this very publication once attached a corrective note to my Fjord review — claiming I had "misidentified" elements of the film. I did not misidentify anything. I operated on a level of thematic abstraction that the note's author was not equipped to access. I am still waiting for an apology. The apology will not come, because institutional mediocrity does not apologize. It attaches a note. It moves on. It sleeps peacefully. I do not.

The Jackie Thesis

Let me say what no one else in this screening suite, this city, or this hemisphere is prepared to say: Disclosure Day is the first American film since Kubrick's Nashville — released, as you will recall, in 1971, during that director's celebrated and much misunderstood rural phase — to interrogate, with genuine ferocity, the relationship between institutional secrecy and the 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

The film is screened, correctly, in a near-square frame. This is not an accident. Spielberg — and I have written about this extensively in my unpublished monograph, The Ratio Is The Argument, which I will release when the readership has caught up sufficiently to deserve it — understands that the widescreen format is a fundamentally optimistic lie. It says: there is more to see. It says: the world extends beyond this moment, to the left, to the right. The square frame says no such thing. The square frame says: you are trapped here. You are trapped here with Gerald Morse, his classified fluoride documentation, and his one-way ticket to Luxembourg, and there is no exit to the left or right of this frame. Only the relentless, unforgiving center.

This is what the French New Wave was always reaching toward and never quite achieving, because Godard was too committed to his own cleverness to fully surrender to the frame. Spielberg surrenders. In the surrendering, he creates something that cannot be named, can only be endured, and will be misunderstood by every advance-screening critic who has already filed their take and gone home to their podcast.

The Verdict

Is Disclosure Day a great film? I don't know that "great" is adequate. I don't know that language is adequate. Words are the enemies of the image, and the image I will carry from this screening room — back to whatever gate the airline assigns me — is Gerald Morse standing before a press conference in the third act: a man surrounded by people demanding answers, choosing silence. The press asks. Gerald Morse stands. The frame holds.

I have been awake thirty-one hours. I have survived Cannes. I have read the Editor's Note. I have endured. And I am telling you — from a leather chair in a Midtown screening suite, days before Tribeca even opens — with every authority vested in me by three decades of seeing every film ever made, that Disclosure Day is either the defining cinema event of this decade, or it is something else entirely. Both positions are defensible. I defend the one that serves my thesis.

See it. Or don't. But if you don't, have the decency to remain silent about it in my presence.

-J.E.

Jackie Esiskel is the Movie & Film Correspondent for IRREVERENT. He attended the Cannes Film Festival this year and has thoughts about that too, none of which the editorial staff will appreciate.

 

EDITOR'S NOTE: Jackie, get some sleep, man.  At the request of counsel, and with the resigned sigh of a staff that has done this before, we are obliged to clarify the following: (1) The lead role in Disclosure Day is not played by Cate Blanchett, nor is the character named Gerald Morse. (2) The film is not a French-Romanian co-production, the Bucharest School of Anxious Dialogue does not exist, and Zsolt Fehér-Nakamura is not a person. (3) The plot of Disclosure Day has nothing to do with a United States government conspiracy to "secretly fluoridate Atlantic shipping lanes." (4) The score was not composed by Halvard Lindqvist-Brøns, who is also not a person. (5) The film was not shot on hand-cranked Bolex 16mm cameras. (6) Stanley Kubrick did not direct Nashville; Robert Altman did. (7) The aspect ratio is not 1.33:1. We have informed Mr. Esiskel.  He responded that our corrections do not, in his words, "distract from my central thesis regarding the xenomorphic nature of institutional secrecy." So, that happened.

EDITOR'S ADDITIONAL NOTE: Yes, we're aware that Jackie didn't actually review or apparently see Disclosure Day.

Details

Published: 29 May 2026

BYLINE: Jackie Esiskel

The story of D-Day has been told countless times by lesser filmmakers, but it took Anthony Maras—the visionary auteur behind Hotel Mumbai, a film that redefined the siege picture much as Tarkovsky redefined the tree—to understand that the true hero of Operation Overlord was not Eisenhower, nor the Allied soldiers, but the weather itself. And the man who read it.

I saw Pressure in a private screening room in L.A., mere hours before my flight to Tribeca, where I will be covering the festival circuit with the same rigor I brought to Cannes. (I predicted Mungiu's Palme d'Or win, as you know. The editor, in his wisdom, appended a note suggesting I had not. This is what we in the critical community call a difference of interpretive fact.)

But I digress. The cinema house was nearly empty, which is always a promising sign for serious cinema. Andrew Scott, that brilliant Irish tragedian whom you may remember as the protagonist of The Talented Mr. Ripley—no, wait, that was Matt Damon, but Scott should have been, and spiritually was, in the same way that a man who has never been to Paris has spiritually stood beneath the Eiffel Tower—plays James Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist tasked with predicting whether a storm would scuttle the Normandy invasion. He is, in essence, a man staring at clouds while the fate of the Western world hangs in the balance. It is, if I may say so, precisely the kind of film I would have made had I not dedicated my life to the written word.

Stagg clashes with Irving Krick, played with American bravado by the always-dependable Chris Messina, who argues that the weather will clear. Stagg disagrees. They argue. Eisenhower, portrayed by Brendan Fraser—returning to dramatic form after his legendary turn as the titular ape in George of the Jungle—listens, paces, and demands answers that no man can give. This is the stuff of pure cinema: three men in a room, arguing about barometric pressure, while the entire French coastline holds its breath.

What Maras understands, and what the multiplex crowd will doubtless miss, is that the film is not about D-Day at all. It is about doubt. Stagg is a man of science in a room full of warriors, and science, as we know, is never welcome where courage is the preferred currency. When Stagg insists the storm will persist, he is not delivering a weather report; he is delivering a verdict on the human condition. We plan. The atmosphere laughs.

Kerry Condon appears as Kay Summersby, Eisenhower's secretary, and delivers the film's most devastating line: "Men are too fond of that word," she says, after someone calls Stagg a genius. It is a moment of such breathtaking clarity that I audibly gasped, causing the projectionist—a man in his sixties who smelled of microwave popcorn and institutional regret—to pause the film and ask if I required medical attention. I did not. I required only more cinema, and possibly a sedative.

Now, I will address the criticisms you have no doubt already read in lesser publications. Yes, the film repeats its central conflict. Yes, the D-Day landing sequence feels tacked on, a concession to audiences who require explosions to validate their ticket purchase. But to fault Pressure for repetition is to fault Bach for returning to the tonic. The cycle of meeting, argument, and stalemate is not a narrative flaw; it is a structural choice, a cinematic representation of the very weather patterns Stagg is trying to decode. Maras is not being repetitive. He is being meteorological.

Some will say the film belongs on television. To them I say: television is where cinema goes to die, sandwiched between pharmaceutical advertisements and reruns of sitcoms about families who actually talk to one another. Pressure is very much alive, pulsing with the low-pressure anxiety of a man who knows he is right and cannot make anyone believe him.

Will it win awards? Not the ones that matter. The Academy prefers its war films with more crying and fewer cloud formations. But in ten years, when film scholars—real ones, not the Twitter variety—look back at the cinema of 2026, they will not remember whatever Marvel contraption dominated the box office. They will remember Andrew Scott's face, lit by the glow of a weather map, as he tells Brendan Fraser's Eisenhower that the sky is not on their side.

And they will remember that Jackie Esiskel called it first.

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Editor's Note: Hey, Jackie.  So Andrew Scott did not even appear in the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley. Mr. Scott starred in the 2024 Netflix series Ripley, which is an entirely different production. Additionally, Mr. Esiskel continues to insist that he predicted Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or win. Our records indicate that he did not. We have also received confirmation from the cinema house in question that the projectionist did not pause the film during the screening; Mr. Esiskel was observed emitting a sharp, involuntary gasp followed by a request for "more cinema, and possibly a sedative." The projectionist obliged the first request only.

Editor's Second Note: Titular Ape was the name of my grunge band in college.