Audiences have propelled Spielberg’s alien thriller to the top of the box office. Yet some exiting the cinema appear to believe this sappy extravaganza is not the director’s finest hour

A sage person once told me every noted director’s career is an ongoing conversation with the audience. Some film-makers – Michael Haneke, say – sit on high, like a headteacher at an assembly, and loftily number the ways in which we’ve let ourselves and the school down. There are others – Lars von Trier and Ari Aster spring to mind – whose work sidles up uncomfortably close, gooses the viewer and then flees the scene sniggering before the relevant authorities can be alerted. The career of Steven Spielberg – arguably the most remarkable career in the history of popular cinema – has long depended on the audience being on the exact same page, looking up wide-eyed and guileless towards the light: his greatest films, from Close Encounters to The Fabelmans, invite further discussion, an awestruck back-and-forth.

You can therefore understand why Spielberg has broached the subject of social division with Disclosure Day, his much-trumpeted return to the summer event movie: he has almost as much skin in this game as the rest of us non-trillionaires. Yet if early box office has been solid enough, secondary indices – not least a slew of disappointed foyer texts from friends and loved ones – would suggest the film has itself proved distinctly polarising. In the US, market research firm CinemaScore – which polls opening-day cinemagoers to assess a film’s commercial prospects – graded Disclosure Day a B, the joint second-worst for a Spielberg film, ahead of AI: Artificial Intelligence (recipient of a harsh C), dead level with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Headmaster Haneke again shakes his weary head.

After Quentin Tarantino’s unfavourable comments about the actor’s performance in films including There Will Be Blood, we run through the roles that show just how potent he really is

This disquieting narrative debut from the British director James Marsh (The Theory of Everything) is a kind of minor Cape Fear. Gael García Bernal plays a sociopathic outsider threatening the apparently perfect life of his long-lost preacher father (William Hurt). In what now looks like a dry run for There Will Be Blood, Dano is the earnest son campaigning for creationism to be taught at school, and sideswiped by the emergence of his sinister half-brother. Variety labelled the film “noxious”. It’s undoubtedly nasty, but Dano helps to lend it a pulse.