A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
I know Quentin Tarantino isn’t where you thought I’d start my review of Toy Story 5, but bear with me. Tarantino famously refuses to watch the fourth Toy Story film, believing the first three constitute a perfect trilogy. While I can respect skipping the fourth film, please go see the fifth—it’s one of the best things to happen to the series since the original Toy Story.
Michael Sarnowski’s grimy new historical-adjacent thriller dares to ask audiences to consider a deeply uncomfortable question. What if Robin Hood was not, in true fact, a sexy swashbuckling animated fox? Let alone one who stole from the rich to give to the poor? Or to unite with his band of affable outlaws who communed in the forest of Sherwood to thwart the avaricious overreaches of a swishy spoiled despot king?
The metaphors run hot and heavy in this down under horror story about the trauma of gay awakenings. Still, small abandoned conservative towns, spooky religion, and the overwhelming potency of teenage lust remain creepily effective tools when deployed this stylishly.
We are conditioned to treat immediate, breathless praise of a new blockbuster with a healthy dose of skepticism. And we should. But Disclosure Day deals in the kind of truth that is impossible to suppress, whether we’re talking about seventy years of government secrets or the reality of the film itself: Steven Spielberg has delivered another late-career masterpiece. It is a film so fiercely entertaining and intellectually stimulating that trying to temper my enthusiasm for it feels like an exercise in dishonesty. It genuinely belongs among his absolute best work.
In the beginning, there were the action figures.
