Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like You Can See Everything:
Primetime
Lance Oppenheim, Nathan Fielder’s co-director on You Can See Everything, made his fiction debut with Primetime, and the two films make for a fascinating double bill. Primetime dramatizes the making of To Catch a Predator, with Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and Skyler Gisondo as one of the show’s decoys. The images are striking and Pattinson is excellent, even if the script never digs as deep as the subject demands.
Zodiac Killer Project
When Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to the book he planned to adapt, he turned the wreckage into Zodiac Killer Project, a wry essay on how true crime documentaries get assembled. It shares Fielder’s fascination with the machinery behind nonfiction storytelling, and while it can be austere, its commentary on the genre’s tropes is sharp.
BlackBerry
If the Silicon Valley hubris behind the Elizabeth Holmes story is what grabs you, Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry is a perfect companion. Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton play the mismatched co-CEOs who built the smartphone that ruled the world before it didn’t. It is a sharp, very funny corporate satire, and one of the best films of 2023.
The Social Network
David Fincher’s The Social Network remains the defining movie about a tech founder whose ambition outpaces everything around him. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg is brilliant, prickly, and impossible to fully read, and Aaron Sorkin’s script turns depositions into some of the most quotable drama of the century.
Predators
David Osit’s Predators comes at To Catch a Predator from the documentary side, asking what it meant to turn stings into prime-time entertainment. The strongest stretches are the most personal, as Osit folds in his own story and eventually sits across from Hansen himself. Like You Can See Everything, it is a film about the ethics of pointing a camera at people at their lowest moments.
Megadoc
Mike Figgis was granted access to the chaotic set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and Megadoc captures a legendary filmmaker, his cast, and his crew colliding in real time. It is equal parts fascinating and exhausting, and it offers the same uneasy thrill as watching Fielder embedded in a household where nobody seems fully in control.
The Perfect Neighbor
Geeta Gandbhir builds The Perfect Neighbor almost entirely from police bodycam footage of a long-running neighborhood dispute that ended with Susan Lorincz fatally shooting Ajike Owens through a door. The film then follows the case to trial. It is a far less playful film than You Can See Everything, but it is just as attentive to what raw footage reveals about people, and it is careful, gripping, and deeply felt.
Sr.
Chris Smith’s Sr. is a portrait of the independent filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., his unruly career, and his relationship with his son, Robert Downey Jr., as the elder Downey lives out his final years with Parkinson’s. It is an earnest, honest look at a famous family coming to terms with itself on camera, and one of the best documentaries of 2022.
Making Marie Antoinette
Assembled from footage Eleanor Coppola shot on the set of her daughter Sofia’s Marie Antoinette, with Diane Lane reading from Eleanor’s journals, Making Marie Antoinette is a quieter study of a public figure seen up close by someone with rare access. It is modest and affectionate, and it reveals more than it first appears to.
Look Into My Eyes
Lana Wilson’s A24 documentary about New York City psychics and the grieving clients who seek them out is a curiosity for anyone drawn to the slippery line between performance and sincerity. It is beautifully made, though it left us wishing it had pushed harder on the questions a skeptic would ask, which is exactly where Fielder never lets up.
READ MORE: Movies Like BlackBerry, Movies Like The Social Network
