Can’t Wait For ‘You Can See Everything’? Watch These 10 Documentaries in the Meantime
These gripping portrayals of scammers and scandals will tide you over until the film of the year hits cinemas.
There are plenty of great things about living in Australia – the weather, the beaches, the coffee. Waiting for films that everyone overseas is raving about to reach our cinemas isn’t one of them.
Right now, that wait feels particularly tedious as we count down to Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s meta-documentary You Can See Everything. Dubbed a “modern masterpiece” by The Guardian, with a near-perfect Metacritic score of 99/100, it comes with considerable expectations.
The three-hour film follows disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the 34 days before she reports to prison for defrauding investors in her blood-testing company. By all accounts, what unfolds goes well beyond that premise, taking viewers on a disorienting, captivating journey.
While we wait for its Australian release on November 12, there’s plenty of other deception to keep us occupied. Here, we’ve rounded up some acclaimed documentaries about people who bent the truth – and what happened when it caught up with them.
1. F for Fake
Starring, written and directed by Orson Welles, one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, F for Fake is part documentary, part film essay. The fraud in its spotlight is Elmyr de Hory: a master art forger in ’60s and ’70s Europe who produced fake Picassos and Modiglianis, among others, and sold them to galleries and glitterati – all while living a bon vivant life and rubbing shoulders with likes of Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth. Welles’ examination of Hory is amusingly jaunty, emphasised when Welles poses parallel questions about artifice in other art forms, such as writing, architecture, storytelling and film. He even turns the camera onto one of his own past works that convinced audiences an alien invasion was upon them. True story.
2. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened
In Netflix’s words: “Fyre Festival was billed as a luxury music experience on a posh private island, but it failed spectacularly in the hands of a cocky entrepreneur”. That cocky entrepreneur was Billy McFarland, who scammed investors out of more than $26 million and even got biggest models of 2017 – Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber, among them – to promote tickets costing up to $100,000 for what would turn out to be a disastrous failure of a festival on a deserted Bahamian island. What guests got when the arrived? A veritable construction site with mattresses on rainsoaked floors and sad styrofoam boxes with wilted cheese on bread as one of their “luxury” meals. The documentary looks back at the lead-up to the event’s calamitous collapse, while raising greater questions about influencer culture and the performance of luxury online.
3. Generation Hustle
Fancy settling in for something a bit longer? HBO’s Generation Hustle is a 10-part docuseries that chronicles the stories of several young entrepreneur-cum-con-artists and the lengths they went to for fame, money and power. Billionaire WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann, faux German heiress Anna Delvey (who also inspired Inventing Anna) and Anthony Gignac, who pretended to be a Saudi prince for decades, are among the scammers covered in the series, as it explores all forms of cons from identity theft to Ponzi schemes and more.
4. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
If you’d like to go deep on the Theranos scandal, we recommend adding this 2019 HBO documentary to your watch list. Directed and produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, it chronicles the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes’ former biomedical company and the grandiose claims she made about its blood-testing technology, which helped Theranos reach a US$9 billion valuation at its peak. Besides actual footage of Holmes at Theranos and in promotional appearances, the documentary compiles interviews with whistleblowers, journalists, ex-Theranos employees, investors, and medical professionals to capture the scandal's depth and breadth.
5. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
“It truly is amazing what people will say on the phone when they don’t know the feds are listening”: Talk about a trailer hook! Using real phone conversations recreated from FBI wiretaps, this documentary looks at the 2019 US college admissions scandal dubbed ‘Operation Varsity Blues’, in which affluent parents – including some Hollywood celebrities – paid more than US $25 million in bribes to falsify their children’s test scores and athletic credentials to secure their place in elite universities such as Yale and Stanford. Mixing real-life footage with reenactments, Matthew Modine plays William Rick Singer, the man behind the whole scheme.
6. Nathan For You
Created by You Can See Everything co-director Nathan Fielder – who also appears as himself in the documentary – the Canadian comedian also plays a fictionalised version of himself in this satirical docu-reality series where he uses his business background to help struggling companies and people. The advice he offers is often unorthodox and over-the-top expensive, spoofing the usual strategies and speak of marketing and management consultants. There are four full seasons to watch of this clever comedy to enjoy. While it covers very different subject matter to You Can See Everything, Fielder’s deftness with awkward confrontations, social experimentation and unscripted reality is well present in both.
7. Sour Grapes
Perhaps one of the coolest things about documentaries is their ability to let us into microcosms we’d otherwise never be privy to. In Sour Grapes, that world is the fine and rare wine scene, and its subject? Wine savant and fraudster Rudy Kurniawan: a counterfeiter who hobnobbed with the wealthy and powerful of New York and LA, selling millions of dollars worth of fraudulent wine through the top auction houses. Operating since the early 2000s, in 2006, he made US $35 million via just two wine auctions. It wasn’t until 2008, when French wine producer Laurent Ponsot realised that wine from his family’s domain was being sold from years they hadn’t produced it, that his crusade against Kurniawan began.
8. Some Kind of Heaven
From the mind of You Can See Everything co-director Lance Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven pulls back the curtain on the idyllic front of The Villages: a sprawling self-contained retirement community in Central Florida. While it’s not about a singular scammer, it cracks the veneer of this seemingly utopian enclave, following a small group of residents and one interloper who haven’t been able to find the “nirvana” The Villages promised them.
9. Super Scam Me
Delving into the dangerous world of romance con artists – in 2025 alone, romance scammers stole more than a billion dollars from American victims – award-winning journalist Mariana van Zeller goes undercover in this documentary, hoping to get scammed. Becoming the ‘prey’ to catch the predator, she adopts a new identity and teams up with a hacker to help her locate several scammers. Between being courted by ‘George Clooney’ and a four-star general deployed to Syria, it’s a wild and often disconcerting watch as she exposes the tech and tactics these scammers use to land their victims.
10. The Tinder Swindler
Released in 2022 to much internet buzz, The Tinder Swindler is a British true crime documentary about Shimon Hayut, a fraudster from Israel who masqueraded as a wealthy diamond heir named Simon Leviev to scam women across Europe out of an estimated US $10 million. The documentary interviews a few of his victims, including his long-term girlfriend Ayleen Koeleman, who was the one who helped finally get him arrested.
Watch in Comfort
Enjoyed This?
Discover more must-watch documentaries.
