Nathan Goldman (senior editor): As an avid fan of TV and philosophy and poetry about extraterrestrial encounters, I was expecting to enjoy Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day—but I did not expect to adore it. In his 35th feature, which centers on a crew of deep state defectors aiming to release classified evidence of alien life, Spielberg is as unabashedly sentimental as he’s ever been. And while I’d rank Jurassic Park among my favorite films and have never reexamined my childhood fondness for E.T., these days I tend to prefer the deadpan and doomsaying to the wide-eyed and wondrous. But even as critiques buzzed in the back of my head—isn’t the movie’s thesis statement, that empathy can bring us back from the precipice of World War III, a liberal delusion?—from the delightfully dizzying opening shot on, I mostly gave myself over to its premise. Several times I even found myself weeping.
But why? Surely part of it is my own tenderness; I’ve been having a rough few weeks and caught a midday showing straight from therapy. Part of it is the mere spectacle, the gorgeous sensorium overwhelm of cinema. But there’s more to it than that. Spielberg is among the canniest pop art craftsmen we have, and here he has composed a perfect machine for pumping the blood and tugging the heartstrings. And the performances are pristine—especially Colman Domingo as a patient oracle and Emily Blunt as a meteorologist who finds herself carried toward a revelation she is only beginning to understand. (At one point, after a thrilling car chase, she collapses into a distressingly realistic panic attack; as Marie Bardi-Salinas points out, it’s a shockingly human response to a blockbuster set piece.)
As I left the theater, the movie I found myself weighing it against was not one of the innumerable other alien flicks (including several of Spielberg’s own), but a work I love by a younger Jewish auteur: Ari Aster’s depraved 2025 masterpiece Eddington. Like that pitch-black comedy, Spielberg’s film lives in the wake of the rupture of the 2020 pandemic, and the missed opportunity to unite in the face of the global catastrophe. Indeed, both films understand that year as a fundamental fracturing. “Would an actual disclosure day reunite what’s divided,” Spielberg has reflected, “or begin to repair what’s broken?”
Aster is less interested in the possibility of putting the pieces back together than running his hands over the shattered bits to produce a bloody inkblot. Yet there’s also a key formal parallel. Part of the genius of Eddington is its approach to screens—the way Aster, rather than try to movie-magic away what it’s like to stare at our phones all day, just represents it in all its ugliness. In Eddington, even when people are talking to each other in real life, it’s often through screens: planes of glass where people see only their own reflection. Spielberg employs the same trick to brilliant effect. In a way, Eddington and Disclosure Day are the same film, with two different answers to the question of the possibility of repair—one naively sanguine, the other crushingly cynical. I’m grateful to have both.
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Boots Riley makes agitprop that actually agitates. His new film, I Love Boosters, looks and sounds like a washing machine filled with Brecht scripts and magic markers, then set to spin cycle. When I stood up at the movie’s end, I had no idea what to think, but I could not mistake the bounce in my legs. Two weeks later, I still find myself absentmindedly chanting the breathy, staccato monosyllables of its theme-song, “Hi Ho.”
The boosters of the title are a gang of clothing thieves in the East Bay, who steal and sell at discount the wildly overpriced wares of a San Francisco billionaire’s chain. Riley’s previous film, Sorry to Bother You, was the finest of several movies from the 2010s chronicling the Bay Area’s surreally rapid gentrification. If much of I Love Boosters feels comparatively placeless, that is sadly accurate to the no-there-there that tech has wrought. Thus the stores the protagonists rip off are named, generically, “Metro Designers.” When the billionaire villain rants, on Instagram, of the “urban bitches” robbing her, the racial euphemism captures how Oakland itself is being evacuated of both Blackness and cultural specificity. “Metro designers” and “urban bitches”: this is a city abstracted into class contradiction.
The abstraction also results from Riley reaching beyond the local, exposing the boosters to potential comrades in the Chinese sweatshop where Metro Designers’ clothes are manufactured. Conveniently, one of them has stolen top secret technology from the state and the bosses: a “situational accelerator” that allows teleportation, the hastening of ongoing historical processes, or the decomposition of objects into the social contradictions that produced them. In other words, the device, which resembles a life preserver, does the work of Marxist theory—and it is objectively thrilling to hear the words “dialectical materialism” enunciated onscreen by a union organizer. The ring also represents Riley’s art itself, which mixes analytic critique and gross, telling exaggeration: a corporate flunky, racing to bring his superior coffee, finds himself bearing his boss on his back in a covered canopy; retail employees must set up racing blocks to fit lunch into their truncated breaks; the billionaire’s San Francisco apartment floor is on a slant, on which she walks comfortably, while workers around her futilely climb and slide. Ironically, what the “situational accelerator” does—reveal process, change, and struggle lurking beneath apparently discrete commodities and persons—is contradicted by what it is: a static, magical object drawn not from radical theory but from Lord of the Rings.
The film does not seem fully in command of that irony, and its pivot from biting satire to revolution is not altogether convincing. Over time, the hilarious jokes thin out, replaced by more and more pointing and shooting of the One Ring. (As my wife pointed out, it’s not good when the labor organizer asserts that new workers will join her planned strike based not on one-on-ones, but on general principles; the logic of the film is that capitalist immiseration plus Marxist theory equals general strike, and never mind the messy work of organizing.) But then I remember all the smug critics who complained about the ending of Sorry to Bother You, which involved workers transformed into centaurs (“equisapiens”), a tech founder’s deranged cult, and such—misshapen gargoyles that turned out somehow, to furnish a historically precise account of how neoliberalism morphed into techno-fascism. And whatever my intellectual quibbles, I was moved to tears by I Love Boosters, which builds toward an unabashedly optimistic dream of international solidarity. One can only hope that this movie’s ending proves as prophetic as its predecessor’s.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón’s latest film, Romería, is in many ways a follow-up to her 2017 film Summer 1993. Both are nakedly autobiographical works, the experiences of the main character—the child Frida in the earlier film, the teenage Marina in the new film—tracking almost precisely, to the last detail, the filmmaker’s troubled life.
Simón’s parents were drug addicts, both of whom died of AIDS when she was a little girl. As Romería begins, Frida, the beautiful young stand-in for Simón, is played with cool charm and determination by Llucia Garcia. She has turned 18 and is seeking a government scholarship so she can attend film school. But her official documents don’t show her father’s identity, and the only way to have that lacuna filled is for her grandparents to officially correct the certificate. Frida sets off on a voyage into a world that by rights was hers, that of her father’s wealthy family, from which she was cut off.
She revisits a past she was too young to remember, or in some cases that occurred before she was born, using her mother’s diary as her guide. Frida attempts to recreate scenes from her parents’ life, imagining the past and then finally reliving it, inserting herself into it as either a witness or a participant. She’s told that she looks like her mother, so we see her making love to her father, who is transfigured in her imagination into a cousin she’d never previously known.
The slipperiness of the past is everywhere in Romería. Frida questions uncles, aunts, and cousins about her parents, and is unable to obtain a sure answer to the question of where they lived in the coastal city of Vigo. The diary, written in the flowery hand of the good bourgeois her mother was, is updated for her: Simón divides the film into diary-like chapters, the story advancing day by day as Frida attempts to get to the truth of her parents’ lives. Is it true her father was hidden in an upstairs room in the family mansion when he was diagnosed with AIDS? Who will know the truth, and will the truth be her parents’ version of it or the objective truth? Frida’s wealthy grandfather attempts to buy her off and put an end to her search by paying for her schooling, allowing him to avoid revisiting his fallen son’s life and death. But Frida and Simón refuse to hide from the truth in this brutally honest film.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Chukat-Balak from Lexie Botzum
The narrative of Parshat Balak, the second reading in this week’s double portion, is unique: It’s the only parshah in the last four books of the Torah that doesn’t feature the Israelites as the main characters. Most of this week’s portion instead follows two non-Israelites: a local king, Balak, and prophet, Bilaam, whom Balak has hired to curse the Israelites. Following a string of Israelite military successes—defeating Sichon, the Amorite king, and Og, the king of Bashan, as well as conquering their territory—the neighboring kingdoms of Moab and Midian are frightened of the Israelites camped on their borders, and so Balak, the king of Moab, proposes hindering their might through prophetic curse.
But this plan backfires spectacularly. Although Bilaam is hired to curse the Israelites, God instructs him not to, “for they are blessed.” Bilaam repeatedly reminds his benefactor that he cannot do anything but what God wills—which Balak ignores, instead bringing him to gaze upon the Israelite encampments and utter a curse. Yet when Bilaam opens his mouth, the words that come forth are indeed ones of support: “How can I damn whom God has not damned; how can I doom when God has not doomed? . . . May my fate be like theirs!”
Balak, however, remains undeterred. He brings Bilaam to another site from which to view and curse the Israelites—but once again, the prophet is able to speak only blessings. “No wickedness is seen in Jacob, no woe in view for Israel,” Bilaam declares. “The Eternal their God is with them, and their Sovereign’s acclaim in their midst.” (Some commentators understand this first line as a declaration of the Israelites’ innocence, while others read it as God choosing not to “see” the people’s evil even when they err; regardless, whether through guiltlessness or favor, Bilaam here presents the Israelites as special in the eyes of God.)
Balak insists on moving to different vantage points, hoping that a new perspective on the Israelites might allow Bilaam to damn them. But, each time, praise issues from his lips. In one instance, he lauds the Israelites’ military prowess, while, in his final blessing, he commends the beauty of their dwellings—a benediction that has made its way into our daily liturgy in a prayer named after the first lines of Bilaam’s ode: “Mah Tovu,” or “How good [are your tents],” a compliment the Rabbis read as referring to the Israelites’ exemplary modesty. Bilaam concludes his praises by prophesying the future defeat of Moab and its neighboring nations’ at the hands of the Israelites.
Viewed far from far above, as Bilaam sees them, the Israelites are powerful and glorious. Their enemies are transformed into powerless, bumbling fools, while they are vast, pious, mighty, and favored by God. From this vantage point, the story lends itself to a triumphalist vision of Jewish exceptionalism—one that many in the Jewish world embrace when reading this parshah.
But the final section of Parshat Balak, only nine verses in length, zooms back in on the Israelite camp. The chapter opens by declaring that, while the Israelites camped in Shitim, they “profaned themselves by whoring with the Moabite women . . . and worshiping their god, Ba’al Peor.” The moment we return to the Israelites, just praised for their modesty and religious devotion, we find them engaging in sexual impropriety and idolatry. Incensed, God inflicts the Israelites with a plague, which is stopped only when the zealous Pinchas—the son of Elazar, who has just replaced his father Aaron as high priest—stabs an Israelite man and Moabite woman having sex. Twenty-four thousand Israelites have perished by the plague’s end.
The dominant Rabbinic position reads these stories as causally linked: The Rabbis, interpreting a later verse, suggest that after failing to curse the Israelites, Bilaam advised the Moabite women to seduce the people into idolatry, knowing the Israelites would be vulnerable to misfortune once they had sinned. However, the 19th-century Italian commentator Shadal contests this reading; if entrapping the Israelites had always been Bilaam’s scheme, he suggests, it shouldn’t have taken three failed attempts at cursing them before he offered this suggestion. Rabbi David Kasher, noting that one of Balak’s chosen vantage points for the attempted curse is “the summit of Peor,” suggests that the stories of the attempted cursing and the plague are not necessarily sequential but rather may have occurred simultaneously. Balak, in this reading, leads Bilaam to a place where the Israelites are embroiled in sin—worshiping the god of Peor—hoping that this perspective might sway God to assent to Balak’s plan. In this telling, the protection the Israelites receive from Balak’s attempted curse becomes a demonstration “not of God’s faithfulness, but of God’s mercy,” as Kasher puts it. In other words, God simultaneously spares the Israelites from the total destruction of Balak’s curse out of a divine kindness they did not earn, and metes out punishment commensurate with their sin.
While we may have begun our parshah primed to fear for the Israelites’ safety, with multiple nations allying against them, the Israelites’ position has changed drastically over the course of this double portion. Whereas earlier in Chukat, the first of this week’s double parshiyot, they are exhausted, hungry, begging for safe passage through neighboring lands only to be violently denied, by the end of that parshah, they’ve defeated two mighty kings and conquered their land. In this sense, at least some of Bilaam’s praise is accurate: The Israelites have become an imposing military force. And so the great irony of Parshat Balak’s final twist is that the only real threat to the Israelites is themselves—leaving the triumphalist reading of our portion deflated at best.
In Talmudic literature, the term “sonei yisrael” (haters or enemies of Israel) is used almost exclusively as a euphemism for Jews themselves, specifically Jewish sinners. Though this is in part an example of “lashon nekiyah”—literally, “clean language,” or the use of euphemism to speak delicately about an uncomfortable reality—it also gets to the heart of this parshah’s dissonance. We begin the parshah with Israel surrounded by external foes but quickly vindicated as its foes are proven impotent and God’s favor confirmed. Yet what we learn, by the end of the parshah, is that Israel is perfectly capable of destroying itself. The Torah proves to us how easily we can be led astray. The Book of Bamidbar, of which this is one of the later parshiyot, has regaled us for many chapters with the Israelites’ travails and repeated failings, but the moment our focus shifts to the external “enemy,” Israel is portrayed as a paragon of virtue. It’s only when we return to taking a hard look at ourselves that we discover the catastrophe we face is brought on not by the actions of our external enemies, but rather by our own misdeeds.
Rabbi Lexie Botzum is a Torah learner, teacher, and organizer based in Washington Heights.
