- Network: HBO
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 18, 2019
Critic Reviews
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Holmes commands the screen as if it belongs to her. She surely must have known all along that it would. Much of the footage here is of the dog-and-pony variety, once commissioned by Theranos and designed to sell the con. But it's so high-gloss--so weirdly hypnotic--that neither Gibney nor "The Inventor" can get to the real human behind the image. A shortcoming of the film? Sure, but the only one. Must watch.
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Alex Gibney’s enthralling documentary about the mesmerizing Elizabeth Holmes.
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The Inventor is one of those documentaries that -- unlike The Edison -- really gets under your skin.
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A complicated story in a briskly compelling narrative enlivened with sharp interviews, resourceful footage and terrific computer graphics.
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It’s hard to know her motives even though that’s what Gibney is eager to find. So we have to judge her by her actions, and those actions are deeply unflattering. ... Instead, The Inventor is at its best when it looks at how Holmes conned respectable figures who bought into her narrative rather than taking a hard look at the data.
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As competent as it is, the film just doesn’t bite very hard.
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Like a lot of Gibney’s work, The Inventor functions most reliably as a fast-paced, involving summary, one occasionally enlivened by the little, revealing bursts of personality he captures from his various talking heads. But as in his Assange doc, We Steal Secrets, Gibney can’t entirely compensate for the (admittedly understandable) void at the center of his portrait—which is to say, for the fact that he couldn’t land an interview with his main subject.
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While The Inventor is filled with bright details and sharp asides that puncture Silicon Valley’s self-mythologizing fabulism, it doesn’t make a strong enough attempt to get behind Holmes’s messianic aura.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 14
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Mixed: 2 out of 14
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Negative: 2 out of 14
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Mar 26, 2019While it's definitely an interesting story, there just wasn't enough content to justify the 2hr run time. One hour would have been pushing it IMO.