You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s explosive documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, opened last week in 855 theaters across the United States and Canada. Despite its limited distribution and its nearly three-hour runtime, the film drew a wider audience than many critics anticipated, earning more than $15 million during opening weekend.
Fielder and Oppenheim’s film, which follows Holmes in the weeks leading up to her 10-year prison sentence, is perfectly calibrated for its cultural moment: through a mix of ultra-tight, wince-worthy crops (you really can see everything) of its subjects’ faces (imminently incarcerated Holmes and her eerily devoted partner, Billy Evans), and a classic Fielder tendency to punctuate a “real life” narrative with moments of rehearsal, the film captures what seems to be a growing cultural appetite for the humbling of the tech overlords.
And although artful documentary filmmaking has waned since its peak in the mid-2000s, the commercial success of You Can See Everything seems poised to reinvigorate the genre from the standard public-television series fare. If you’re feeling inspired to watch some other genre-spanning documentaries, here are the ones to consider.
Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Watch On: Youtube or Tubi
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi tackles a conventional subject through the least orthodox means imaginable. The film develops an entirely original visual language to investigate the toll of industrialization, experimenting with time-lapse and slow-motion video to abstract familiar scenes of urban life until they’re barely recognizable. A haunting score by Philip Glass accompanies this 86-minute montage, but otherwise there is nothing: no interviews, no narrative arc, no voiceover. The film does not need many compositional elements to achieve thematic complexity—its sparseness is disturbing enough on its own.
Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Watch On: Tubi
Filmmakers once took for granted that objectivity was the documentary’s chief virtue. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore, whose directorial debut was Roger and Me, a 1989 breakout documentary, throws this assumption out the window. In the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting at Columbine High School, Moore investigates the cultural drivers of gun violence in America. Rather than downplaying his political agenda, he advances it using every rhetorical strategy at his disposal: Bowling for Columbine features an animated interlude, a montage set to the Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and even a confrontation between Columbine survivors and Kmart executives concerning the retailer’s sale of ammunition.
Eno (2024)
Watch On: Rent from Apple TV or Prime Video
Celebrated as an early breakthrough in generative filmmaking, Gary Hustwit’s Eno uses a custom-designed algorithm to select which scenes, music, and interviews from Brian Eno’s life you see, and in what order. Each version of the film is unique, but none of them offers a self-serious portrait of the prolific musician. Instead, we get a cheerful and intellectually ambitious meditation on art, technology, and the passage of time. The unorthodox formal choice is incredibly effective in capturing the essence of Eno’s creative philosophy, which holds that experimentation is more fruitful than careful choreography.
Seven Up! (1964)
Watch On: Buy on Prime Video
Paul Almond’s Seven Up! is the first installment of a documentary project that interviewed a cohort of 14 British schoolchildren every seven years until they reached the age of 70. The creators of the series set out to highlight how socioeconomic disparities affected the participants’ longterm, but they ended up introducing a new paradigm of temporality to the genre. Seven Up! stands as one of the few films to recognize that the essential truths documentarians seek take a lifetime to excavate and cannot be compressed into a two-hour run time.
Cameraperson (2016)
Watch On: HBO Max or Kanopy
What is the difference between raising awareness about an issue and exploiting the suffering of those affected by it? How can we trust what we see in a documentary when we know that the presence of a camera must have skewed its participants’ behavior? These are the kinds of thorny questions Kirsten Johnson raises in Cameraperson, an autobiographical film that melds together clips from her previous projects and videos of her mother dying of Alzheimer’s. Though Johnson has more than 25 years of experience deciding what belongs in the frame, Cameraperson shows that her greatest strength may be revealing what lies just outside it.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)
Watch On: HBO Max
Of all the films featured on this list, Spike Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the only one to borrow dramatic techniques from fictional narratives to the same extent Fielder does in You Can See Everything. Divided into four acts, the film has the pacing and structure of an opera or a classical Greek tragedy. Terence Blanchard’s moving score draws on New Orleans’ jazz inheritance, and with its wailing solo trumpet, it becomes almost a character in its own right. While much of the film strikes an elegiac tone, the final act gives way to a defiant celebration of Black life, a tonal shift that evokes the tradition of the jazz funeral.
Grizzly Man (2005)
Watch On: Youtube, Tubi, or Kanopy
Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man more closely resembles a Socratic dialogue than it does a traditional nature documentary. The film assimilates haunting self-taped videos that wildlife enthusiast Timothy Treadwell made during his summers living with Alaska grizzlies and impassive narration from Herzog, who questions Treadwell’s romantic view of nature. Although he is quick to deflate his subject’s lofty philosophical claims, Herzog has a great deal of empathy for Treadwell. At the end of the documentary, he puts on a pair of headphones and, with a sense of grim determination, listens to the last recording Treadwell made, which inadvertently captured his dismemberment by grizzlies in 2005.
Don’t Fuck With Cats (2019)
Watch On: Netflix
Hear us out. The virality of Don’t Fuck With Cats cemented the inevitable convergence between the rabidly popular true crime genre and documentary filmmaking. Mark Lewis’s three-part docuseries follows internet sleuths Deanna Thompson and John Green as they use digital clues to track down the murderer Luka Rocco Magnotta. Lewis’s insight was that today’s audiences might be interested in criminal investigations that unfold not in police stations or in morgues, but across cyberspace. His series raises an eerie question: are true-crime viewers complicit when their attention emboldens a criminal who craves notoriety?
Stop Making Sense (1984)
Watch On: Rent with Apple TV, Prime Video, or A24
It is easy to forget that Stop Making Sense is the prototype for the concert film as we know it today. But when Jonathan Demme set out to film the Talking Heads during its four-night stint at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, he made a number of choices that seemed unorthodox at the time. The documentary is almost entirely made up of live concert footage, with no backstage interviews and no shots of the crowd until the very end. Although bassist Tina Weymouth has said that many of these decisions were made to avoid drawing comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap, they nonetheless helped to define a new subgenre of the documentary that encompasses everything from Shut Up and Play the Hits to Summer of Soul.
Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
Watch On: Netflix
In this so-called “living obituary,” Kirsten Johnson contends with her father’s dementia diagnosis by rehearsing his death in fanciful and sometimes even outlandish ways. Johnson’s father indulges her ideas: early in the film, he gamely collapses when a prop air conditioner falls on his head. Ultimately, Dick Johnson Is Dead transcends its macabre premise, as the collaboration of staging these scenarios becomes a way of escaping and processing grief.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
The Author of One of Mark Zuckerberg’s First Profiles Critiques ‘The Social Reckoning’
It’s Hard to Get People to Look at Art. Will They Listen to It Instead?
WNBA Star Paige Bueckers and Artist Sadie Barnette on Why So Many Artists Love Basketball
One Prominent Writer Tells Us How She Really Affords the Freelance Grind
All of New York’s Best Wellness Treatments (and Their At-Home Dupes)
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
