You Can See Everything Scores 99 on Metacritic, a Record for Documentary

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary You Can See Everything has posted a Metacritic score of 99/100 — an unprecedented figure for a documentary and the highest since Moonlight, the 2016 best picture Oscar-winner, earned the same mark. The film is not yet released outside the US and Canada.

The three-hour examination of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder at the center of the Theranos scandal, logged $15m at the US and Canada box office in its opening weekend. Audiences, in other words, have not been deterred by the runtime.

The Guardian's critic called the film "a stupefying and gloriously destabilising hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject." That quote carries voice, and it is not alone: reviews have been overwhelmingly favourable.

What do the numbers actually show?

The aggregates stack up like this:

• Metacritic: 99/100 — unprecedented for a documentary, and 24th on the site's all-time list.
• Rotten Tomatoes: 99% from 117 reviews so far, putting the film in contention for the site's best-rated release of 2026.
• Letterboxd: 4.7/5 — effectively the highest-rated cinema release ever on the platform. The three titles above it are a live Radiohead concert and two television shows (Band of Brothers and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).

For context, Metacritic's top 10 best-rated films include Citizen Kane (1941), The Leopard (1963), The Conformist (1970) and Tokyo Story (1972). You Can See Everything now sits in that company before most of the world can see it.

What does this change for the film?

A 99 Metacritic score is not just a laurel. It is a distribution argument. A three-hour documentary about a corporate fraud, from directors better known in niche circles than multiplex ones, has now out-rated Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which scored 88/100, and Digger, which managed 46.

A caveat on the hype

Metacritic is one aggregator. Rotten Tomatoes counts 117 reviews — a solid sample, not a final verdict, and the film's year-end standing on both platforms remains open. Letterboxd's crown comes with an asterisk: "effectively" highest-rated means three non-cinema titles outrank it.

At the other end of the scale, Rotten Tomatoes' bottom 10 (films with 20 or more reviews) includes Tom & Jerry: The Forbidden Compass (2025), Left Behind (2014) with Nicolas Cage, Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio (2002) and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (2004), which the Wall Street Journal's Joanne Kaufman called "unspeakably ghastly." The distance between those films and a 99 is the whole story here.

The film arrives on international screens next. If the numbers hold beyond opening weekend and the US and Canada, 2026 has its first genuine awards-year front-runner.