r/boxoffice • Best of 2019 Winner • 1d ago

💯 Critic/Audience Score 'You Can See Everything' Review Thread

I will continue to update this post as reviews come in.

Rotten Tomatoes: Fresh

Critics Consensus: N/A

Critics Score Number of Reviews Average of Rated Reviews
All Critics 100% 43 9.50/10
Top Critics 100% 16

Metacritic: 97 (21 Reviews)

Sample Reviews:

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic 5/5 - You’ve seen elements of “You Can See Everything” in documentaries before. But you’ve never seen them combined like this. It’s a true original.

Cary Darling, Houston Chronicle 5/5 - "You Can See Everything" throws into sharp relief audience's expectations while skewering the entire idea of the traditional documentary and its contemporary off-shoot, reality TV.

Tim Grierson, Screen International - Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s extraordinary documentary soon goes in unexpected directions, becoming an uneasy treatise on love, reality television, and the ways filmmakers try (and often fail) to capture ’real’ life.

Monica Castillo, AV Club A- - Like Welles used his camera to play tricks on audiences some 50 years ago, Fielder and Oppenheim use their film to shake up their audience’s understanding of how we believe one another.

Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence A - The film is more than an extension of Fielder’s blending comedy and documentary with shows like The Rehearsal — it’s an evolution upon it. It asks everyone involved to look at themselves, and face the difference between perception and reality.

Marshall Shaffer, Slant Magazine 3.5/4 - You Can See Everything innovatively probes this gray area between the fabulations made about Elizabeth Holmes and those made by her.

David Fear, Rolling Stone - You will likely have no idea what you have just seen, besides that it's simply, unabashedly, unashamedly brilliant.

Alison Willmore, New York Magazine/Vulture - In You Can See Everything, the closer we get to her, the less knowable she is — a set of pointillist dots in the shape of a person.

Kristy Puchko, Mashable - You Can See Everything is a masterwork of interrogation, not only of the whole Holmes situation but of documentary as a form itself.

Adrian Horton, Guardian 5/5 - There is something extremely satisfying in watching Fielder’s sharp angles tangle with Holmes’s disposition of guileless warmth, a strange and compelling chemistry building within a reality distortion field.

Nick Schager, The Daily Beast - Not just the film of the year—it’s a documentary that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.

Kyle Smith, Wall Street Journal - With co-director Lance Oppenheim, Mr. Fielder gets around the restrictions on his access to the locked-up Ms. Holmes with his customary hilarious meta-narrative brilliance.

Tomris Laffly, RogerEbert.com 4/4 - The significance of 'You Can See Everything' is clear as a film that might advance a new cinematic language in the mainstream non-fiction sphere.

Angie Han, The Hollywood Reporter - What begins as a fascinatingly intimate portrait of a deluded or disingenuous scammer reveals as something even wilder, more ambitious and less predictable, until we’re left to ponder what value a personal truth has at all.

Cortlyn Kelly, IndieWire A - For how disquieting it is, the film never goes too long without forcing a laugh.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety - It’s a one-of-a-kind reality-TV-as-hangout-movie psychodrama circus. Yet it’s been made with a spirit of true inquiry, driven by Fielder’s acidly quizzical personality, and it gets its hooks in you.

SYNOPSIS:

Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.

CAST:

  • Elizabeth Holmes as Herself
  • Nathan Fielder as Himself
  • Billy Evans as Himself

DIRECTED BY: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim

PRODUCED BY: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, Tatiana Bears, Maggie Ambrose, Jack Davis

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Emily Osborne

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: David Bolen

PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Alex DiGerlando

EDITED BY: Adam Locke-Norton

MUSIC BY: Ari Balouzian

RUNTIME: 174 Minutes

RELEASE DATE: October 16, 2026

1.1k Upvotes

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13

u/CrystalizedinCali 1d ago

I don’t like most of Nathan Fielder’s work (it makes me too uncomfortable on multiple levels to enjoy it) but I have tickets for this Thursday night. Curious to see if I like it!

3

u/CubitsTNE 1d ago

Instead of one master at making you squirm you've signed up to see two.

God speed!

6

u/Mike_Hagedorn 1d ago

That’s where I’m at too; I get the opposite response most people get from Fielder’s stuff, but his tone looks like it fits here.

3

u/quaranTV 1d ago

This is the least cringey of his works. I think you will like it!

1

u/beaglefat 17h ago edited 7h ago

I think a lot of his stuff would be really funny if he took it a step further. Like its always a good / interesting premise and then i just dont find it funny. Felt this way for sure about the rehearsal. I think he has really good ideas but isnt very funny himself. So maybe this documentary style will suit him better

edit: I worded this wrong. a better way to say it is his bits often times lack a punch line

3

u/FriendlyChannel3988 12h ago

How could you possibly take The Rehearsal a step further? The guy learned how to fly a plane for 2 years

1

u/hhhisthegame 11h ago

Maybe the person only watched S1?

3

u/einstyle 11h ago

Man, I left S1 thinking “how could he possibly take this a step further” and then he did in S2 lmao

2

u/JacobdaTurtle61 12h ago

I feel like that’s kind of the point of his stuff. I totally get where you’re coming from but I also feel like it’s a conscious restraint to maintain that discomfort as much as possible

1

u/vraalapa 14h ago

I didn't find The Rehearsal as funny as Nathan For You. I did find it super fascinating and very interesting however. Makes me interested in this documentary even if I don't expect to find it laugh out loud funny.

Another show that I would recommend, if you want to really see some interesting ways to tell a story, is How To With John Wilson.

1

u/Elkku26 2h ago

I agree, I though The Rehearsal could've been funnier. It's very fascinating, but it's the follow up to Nathan For You, which in my opinion is the funniest show of all time, and a part of me really hopes he will do something as funny again one day, even if what he's been doing after Nathan For You is arguably more ambitious and creative.

1

u/wubbwubbb 7h ago

Imagine taking the poop flavored froyo episode “a step further.”