I was a little baffled by how many film critics and moviegoers were awestruck by Nathan Fielder’s documentary about fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything, which makes the (apparently to them) stunning point that of course you can’t see everything. From Variety:
By Rebecca Rubin
“You Can See Everything” accomplished a true box office feat, becoming the rare must-see documentary on the big screen.
Director Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-hyped look at Elizabeth Holmes has generated a massive $15 million from just 855 theaters. Those ticket sales were enough for second place behind another newcomer, Paramount’s video game adaptation “Street Fighter,” which opened to $30 million from 3,575 venues. Heading into the weekend, “You Can See Everything” was aiming for $7 million to $8 million, which would have been remarkable for a documentary, especially one that doesn’t involve music or capture a wildly popular concert. Not to mention, this one runs at nearly three hours and wasn’t on anyone’s radar until two months ago.
After a surprise world premiere at Telluride Film Festival, “You Can See Everything” became a word-of-mouth sensation, bolstered by some of the best reviews of the year. A24, which produced the movie in secret over three years for roughly $7 million, reported more than 2,000 sold-out screenings as audiences rushed to theaters to avoid spoilers on the stranger-than-fiction story about the Theranos founder before she began an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. People are clearly captivated by the drama surrounding Holmes, whose rise and spectacular fall from grace was depicted in the Hulu series “The Dropout,” starring Amanda Seyfried. But the turnout for “You Can See Everything” also speaks to the commercial appeal of Fielder, who has developed a flair for blending reality and fiction through works like HBO’s “The Rehearsal” and Comedy Central’s “Nathan For You.”
Fielder, who worked on a Sacha Baron Cohen TV show, is SBC’s worthy successor. His shtick has been to play Ali G/Borat, but about 12 IQ points higher. Thus his famous “Dumb Starbucks” sketch a decade ago in which he looks up “parody law” on Wikipedia and decides he can open a fake Starbucks as long as he calls it “Dumb Starbucks:”
But lately he’s gotten more philosophical and serious, so You Can See Everything is only modestly funny.
Oppenheim, his co-director, recently helmed another A24 hit, the Robert Pattinson-led “Primetime,” which has earned nearly $50 million against a $15 million budget.
Fielder is clearly the guiding light of the movie, but he also appears to be the lead actor and main writer. It’s probably fair to say that Oppenheim is the main director. Oppenheim is only 30 years old, which is extremely young for an impressive film director in 2026. He’s really good.
Around 70% of opening weekend crowds were under 35 years old, and they liked what they saw onscreen. According to exit polls, 90% of ticket buyers would “definitely recommend” the film and 80% said it was “even better than expected.” Those reactions signal a long theatrical life for the movie, which is expanding nationwide in the weeks to come.
“This is a giant weekend for the genre,” says analyst David A. Gross, who publishes the box office newsletter FranchiseRe. “Documentaries rarely receive a wide release — there’s only one every other year — and they average $3 million over their first three days.”
But … didn’t you already know that you can’t trust everything you see on-screen?
Well, I guess a large number of people didn’t appreciate that fact until this week.
So I suppose it’s a good thing that Fielder spends three hours emphasizing that rather banal point.
Personally, over the last 25 years, I’ve written hundreds of movie reviews, on and off, several hundred of them based on sourced material.
One of my basic approaches as a film critic has been to look up their source material — whether a novel or a “true story.”
Sometimes I’d already read the book the movie was based-upon, or I’d read the news articles before-hand. For example, I had read Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyou’s bestseller Bad Blood about the Holmes fraud in 2018.
Other times, I went out and bought the book (but did not read it) before going to see the film, then read it immediately after watching the movie. Or if it were “Based on a true story,” I’d then read the news coverage after watching the film.
I have a self-imposed rule that I will not read a book for the first time just before seeing the film, because I don’t want to be overly persnickety about whether or not the film lived up to my expectations or not.
On the other hand, if I’d read, say, The Lord of the Rings when I was twelve in 1971, well, I couldn’t help that in deciding whether the films were good or not. (They were good.)
But I wasn’t going to tell you not to see the movie because it wasn’t how I’d pictured the book … when I first read the book 48 hours ago.
Instead, I read up on the fictional or true story after I saw the movie, so I could comment intelligently on how the filmmakers adapted it.
Now, I’m highly sympathetic toward filmmakers. They are, after all, making films, which I enjoy and thus encourage. Making a movie is a difficult challenge. So I try not to be pedantically critical about choices that that they made to fit a voluminous story into a movie or TV show.
On the other hand, I also feel that my readers deserve to know what the filmmakers chose to include and what they left out.
That, however, is not a common practice among film critics, for understandable reasons.
I never wrote much more than one review per week, so I could afford to take a certain amount of time. I often saw a preview on a Tuesday night at 7 pm of a film debuting in theaters that Friday, and then filed my copy about 36 hours later on Thursday morning.
That’s a somewhat less exhausting schedule than Roger Ebert, the top daily reviewer, who typically wrote 3 to 6 movie reviews per week, followed. Obviously, Ebert didn’t have time to look up the facts behind the latest movie. He mostly wrote about what he saw on-screen, not about what actually had happened. And he didn’t have the Internet until fairly late in his career.
Pauline Kael, the top magazine reviewer, typically wrote one movie review about every six days.
My idol was Richard Grenier of the monthly Commentary, author of a 10,000 word 1983 review of Gandhi, who specialized in looking up the facts behind the latest movie.
Of course, working on a weekly schedule, I couldn’t match Grenier on his monthly schedule. But I did have the Internet.
What I saw was that filmmakers were not, you will be shocked, shocked to hear, scrupulously factual. They had to fit complicated stories into limited screentimes and make them appealing. So they routinely cut a few corners.
I didn’t find this appalling. But I thought it worth mentioning to readers that, say, “This is a good movie, but it’s not really what precisely happened. Here’s what in fact occurred.”
But it appears that plenty of people, and even some critics, didn’t pick up on that basic reality until seeing Fielder deconstruct the documentary.
You Can See Everything is another interesting Nathan Fielder project, although not as funny as his “Dumb Starbucks” sketch. But it’s strikingly uninformative about the Theranos fraud.
A few important angles that Fielder mostly skipped over are that: …
Paywall here.
