Grade: A minus

You Can See Everything review: Keep Your Friends Theranos

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything

Elizabeth Holmes is a fraud. Nathan Fielder is a freak. Those may sound like vicious accusations, but in Holmes’ case, the charge has been substantiated by a federal jury, which found her guilty in 2022 of swindling investors. As for Fielder, you need only watch a few minutes of any episode of his television work to learn that he’s painfully, pathologically awkward. They would seem to make strange bedfellows. But one of the insights of You Can See Everything, the brain-scrambling documentary that Fielder has made with Lance Oppenheim, is that people can be difficult to pin down, and can surprise you if you make an effort to understand them. Sometimes that effort involves questioning your own assumptions. And sometimes it means following them around with cameras for a solid month.

I’m being more literal than you might think. As a matter of nuts-and-bolts production, You Can See Everything is notable for the startling degree of access that Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, have granted to the filmmakers. The brunt of the movie takes place in their Del Mar beach house, chronicling the 34 days preceding Holmes’ scheduled surrender at a federal prison in Texas. The couple’s ostensible rationale—which reflects either brazen confidence or breathtaking naïveté—is that an unvarnished depiction of their home life will combat the media’s prevailing narrative of Holmes as a conniving huckster: the reckless woman who duped credulous financiers into believing that she and her healthcare company, Theranos, had invented a nigh magical device which could screen for countless diseases from a single drop of blood. Despite the guilty verdict, she maintains her innocence, and the film practically dares you to ask whether she’s telling the truth. The questions only pile up from there. Read More

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Toy Story 5 review: If It Makes You Happy, It Can’t Be That iPad

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jessie and Bullseye in Toy Story 5

The two main characters in Toy Story 5 are named Joy and Anxiety. Wait, sorry, that was Inside Out 2. But like most outputs from the Pixar animation factory, the Toy Story franchise has always mingled childlike delight with gnawing apprehension. Its titular playthings, be they cowboys or spacemen or dinosaurs, perpetually worry about their charge’s well-being, to say nothing of their own potential obsolescence. They’ve battled maniacal prospectors and tyrannical bears and possessive dummies, but none of that has prepared them for their most daunting challenge yet: an iPad.

Technically she’s a smart tablet. Her name is Lilypad, as befits her glossy green bezel, but despite her smooth finish and smoother voice (as provided by Greta Lee), she isn’t here to make friends—at least, not with toys. Lily is the property of eight-year-old Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the kindhearted, soft-spoken girl whom we first met in Toy Story 3, when she became custodian of the action figures and stuffed animals who previously belonged to Andy. Those relics have plenty of experience assimilating new arrivals—the thrust of Toy Story 4 involved Woody (Tom Hanks) looking after the freshly assembled Forky (Tony Hale), a misshapen utensil who was less interested in playing with children than diving into trash—but Lily represents a different sort of threat to their established ecosystem. She may have the same prime directive (ensure Bonnie’s welfare), but whereas our existing toys are products of spit-and-glue physicality, Lily operates in the digital ether, using her online functionality and programming savvy to connect Bonnie with screen-wielding peers. What is the labor of a sandcastle or the complexity of a racetrack compared to the ease of a group chat? Read More

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Disclosure Day review: The Day the Earth Stood Thrilled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day

The possibility of intelligent life on other planets has long preoccupied countless dreamers, philosophers, and filmmakers—few more famous than Steven Spielberg. The director’s career is as versatile as it is vast, but every so often he has returned, like a pilot locked in an orbital loop, to the topic of extraterrestrials. Disclosure Day, his deeply enjoyable and sneakily provocative new movie, represents both another iteration of this process and a thoughtful update of it. It is plainly a work of science-fiction, featuring cosmic discoveries, dastardly villains, and earth-shaking developments. But it is also an urgent and thorny tract that fixates, quite profoundly, on the nature of the human race. For all its stargazing, it’s less about aliens than people.

Not that anyone would confuse Disclosure Day for a sterile think-piece. It is instead, in nuts and bolts, a chase picture. Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a programmer at a paramilitary security firm called Wardex, has smuggled a trove of classified materials out of the company’s Virginia archives, along with a handheld MacGuffin-y device that looks like a cross between the cryptex from The Da Vinci Code and the neuralyzer from Men in Black. Catching him if he can is Wardex’s CEO, Scanlon (Colin Firth), who acquires some leverage by kidnapping Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, who worked with Spielberg in Bridge of Spies). In the movie’s tense opening sequence, Scanlon and his no-nonsense underlings hold the lovers at gunpoint, only for Daniel to threaten to activate the device and use its apparent danger to pull off a daring escape, at which point the hunt is on. Read More

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Crime Pays in the Indie Thrillers Tuner and Carolina Caroline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leo Woodall in Tuner; Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving in Carolina Caroline

One of the pleasures of moviegoing is vicarious excitement—the thrill of experiencing something you can’t possibly attain in real life. I am not a professional athlete, an ingenious detective, or a vampire slayer, but cinema brings me closer to such larger-than-life heroes, even if it can also shade them with relatable humanity.

This is particularly true when it comes to crime—especially theft. As a rule-abiding office drone who hesitates before lifting extra paperclips from the supply closet, I’m personally unacquainted with chases and shootouts and scores, so I have a weakness for movies about robbers scheming to pull a heist. The past few weeks saw two independent pictures featuring blue-collar characters who discover a latent aptitude for stealing, a talent that brings them both prosperity and danger. If neither made a peep at the box office, well, maybe that’s because they’re still eluding society’s dragnet. Read More

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Depression Double Feature: Omaha and Blue Heron

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eylul Guven in Blue Heron; John Magaro in Omaha

Movies aren’t better just because they’re sad. Sure, the Oscars tend to favor dramas over comedies, but making people feel bad isn’t an inherent artistic good. As with any other subgenre, the success of depressing pictures hinges on qualities beyond their deflating subject matter: the specificity of the characters, the nuance of the performances, the skill of the filmmaking.

This past weekend saw the expanded release of two small, family-centric movies whose tone can hardly be called cheerful. Both execute their assignment of shaking you up, though only one breaks new cinematic ground in the process. Read More

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