The new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and a whole lot of other stuff, You Can See Everything, was released in theaters Thursday night, and social media is in awe. It’s not just the best movie of the year; it could be the best movie ever made, according to those who turned out for the first day.
The early reviews are phenomenal. The film has a score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, 99% on Fandango, and 9.3 on IMDb. How high is 9.3 relative to the other movies on the platform? Well, it’s tied for first place with 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption. The second-highest rating is The Godfather (1972) at 9.2, and the third is The Dark Knight (2008) at 9.1.
But if You Can See Everything is tied with a rating of 9.3, why doesn’t it appear on the list for IMDb’s Top 250? That’s explained at the bottom of the page: “The top rated movie list only includes feature films.”
That means that shorts, TV movies, and documentaries are not included in the list for IMDb’s Top 250. Getting on the list also requires a rating from at least 25,000 users. You Can See Everything currently has ratings from about 1,000 users. For context, the highly polarizing film Digger has 37,000 ratings after being out for two weeks, so we can expect it won’t be long before Fielder’s masterpiece has that many ratings. (You should also see Digger, by the way.)
Anyone who’s heard about this movie probably knows that there are some surprises. There’s an A-list celebrity, and the film received a warning about full-frontal nudity. And we’re not about to deliver spoilers to you here. But it’s really hard to talk about this film and how amazing it is without revealing the twists and turns that make it so special.
That being said, there’s a case to be made that this film may be misclassified. It’s not really a spoiler to say that one can question whether this movie really is a pure documentary. It’s co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, and Fielder has been blurring the line between reality and fiction in all of his previous work.
But it’ll be very interesting to see how the ratings for this film evolve over the next couple of weeks. There are a small handful of negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, including one person who gave the film 3.5 stars out of five: “It’s 3 hours. Only the last half is interesting.”
Another user who gave the film just one star wrote: “So boring and no plot or outcome to speak of. If the goal was to help her cause it didn’t.”
As someone who has seen the film and thinks it deserves the Academy Award for Best Picture, I can tell you these reviews are absurd. But I also wonder whether it will get the nomination for the top honor since it’s a documentary. There’s never been a Best Picture winner that was classified as a documentary. But, again, there’s a case to be made that this isn’t necessarily a documentary. It is. And it isn’t. And that’s all I can say. Just go see it.
