Critic Reviews

Almost immediately, it’s evident that You Can See Everything pushes the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, and somehow, even after 174 minutes, it leaves us hungry and curious for more.

A triumphant, riveting, and continually shape-shifting piece of creative non-fiction with curiosity and a playful sense of uncomfortable humor that will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Fielder’s work, it’s the kind of documentary that is persistently inquisitive and skeptical: both about its alarmingly wide-eyed subject who often refuses to blink, and the process of documentary filmmaking itself.

Fielder and Oppenheim’s film blurs the lines of reality and fiction in ways so akin to those that exist in the modern state of pop culture. Ethical boundaries are always on the bleeding edge of a Fielder project and that is no different here.

You will likely have no idea what you have just seen, besides that it’s simply, unabashedly, unashamedly brilliant.

Not just the film of the year—it’s a documentary that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.

You Can See Everything shrewdly demonstrates the fallacy of reality in art while acknowledging that everyone — including the filmmakers and Holmes and Evans — distorts the truth for their own purposes.

What really makes the movie so astounding, a metanarrative mille-feuille about all the ways we try to gauge the truth, is how Holmes’s freak squares with Fielder’s, and how Primetime prodigy Lance Oppenheim, with whom Fielder shares a co-director credit, shapes the project into something shockingly cinematic.

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.

You Can See Everything is, somehow, more shocking, twistier, thornier and revealing than billed – a stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject.

You Can See Everything isn’t a conventional documentary, but I know this: It’s a great one.