Film

Big Eyes

Name: Big Eyes
Genre: Drama
Released: 2014
Cast: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Jon Polito, Krysten Ritter

Biopic

Tim Burton's account of art-world fraud and female erasure in 1950s America. Amy Adams plays Margaret Keane, whose luminous paintings of melancholy children made her husband famous—while she stayed invisible. It's a small, focused drama about quiet rage and reclamation, set against Americana kitsch. For anyone interested in how women's work gets stolen, or how charm can be a weapon.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy stories about creative theft and quiet domestic injustice told with a sly, sunlit period style, the kind where the look of a film does half the talking.

Skip it if you want a sharp, propulsive thriller, since this is a measured, fairly restrained drama that keeps its sights on a single relationship and rarely raises its pulse.

What it asks of you: Little urgency at first, then a gradually tightening squeeze; it runs a brisk 106 minutes and wants you to sit with discomfort rather than be rescued from it.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Hidden Figures2016

A rousing ensemble drama about Black women mathematicians whose essential work was erased from NASA's history. Like Big Eyes, it's about brilliant people denied credit, but it swings toward celebration and triumph rather than lingering in the wrongness.

But The uplift is quite deliberate—it's engineered to satisfy rather than haunt. If you wanted the movie to stay angrier, it won't.

Woman in Gold2015

Helen Mirren as an elderly Austrian woman fighting to reclaim a Klimt painting stolen by the Nazis. Same DNA as Big Eyes: art, theft, a woman's claim on what's rightfully hers, and the machinery that keeps denying it to her.

But It can feel overly schematic—good guys and bad guys sorted neatly. Lacks the queasy moral ambiguity of Burton's film.

Mank2020

David Fincher's black-and-white dive into Hollywood's golden age and the real author of Citizen Kane. It shares Big Eyes' obsession with credit, authorship, and the gap between who deserves acclaim and who receives it.

But Deliberately baroque and slow. If you want momentum over mood, this will feel like reading a very long article about something that happened eighty years ago.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Big Eyes

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles1976

Both films are obsessed with women's work—labour so embedded in daily life it becomes invisible—and both use form to make that invisibility screamingly visible.

Three days in the life of a woman performing domestic and sex work with ritualistic precision. It's not about drama—it's about the invisible labour that structures a life, and what happens when routine breaks. A radical formal choice about invisibility that speaks directly to Margaret's erasure.

But It is almost four hours long and almost nothing happens. Chantal Akerman films housework as seriously as you'd film revolution, which is the point—but patience is mandatory.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles poster

The Iron Claw2023

A portrait of a family business built on charisma and control, where the patriarch's magnetism masks corrosion. The emotional texture—how charm corrodes trust—mirrors Walter Keane's marriage.

But Heavy and very long. The tragic arc is visible from far away, which can feel inevitable rather than devastating.

The Danish Girl2015

Another intimate two-hander about identity and visibility, with a spouse's love curdling into possession. Eddie Redmayne is extraordinary, and the painting-within-the-film feels as central as it does in Big Eyes.

But The film subordinates its subject's agency in ways that haven't aged brilliantly. Worth watching anyway, but you'll notice it.

Catch Me If You Can2002

A lighter spin on reinvention and deception. Frank Abagnale charms his way through the world, much like Walter; the appeal is watching charisma as a tool, and the moment it stops working.

But It's a Spielberg-Hanks crowd-pleaser, ultimately more fascinated by Frank's genius than his moral rot. Doesn't investigate damage the way Big Eyes does.

Bombshell2019

Three women destroyed by a man who weaponized charm and power. Like Big Eyes, it's about how institutional complicity lets one person erase and humiliate many. Darker and more vicious than you'd expect.

But Tonally jagged—sometimes it lands as satire, sometimes as genuine horror, and the seams show. The tonal instability bothers some viewers more than others.

A Woman Under the Influence1974

John Cassavetes' portrait of a marriage where one person's needs consume the other. Raw, improvised, bewildering. If you want to understand how Margaret Keane felt, Gena Rowlands will show you.

But Nearly three hours of unstructured intimacy. It's not a narrative film in the traditional sense—it's an emotional excavation, and if that sounds exhausting, it can be.

The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Leonardo DiCaprio as a con man whose charisma is his currency, charming everyone including himself. The film asks how long you stay enchanted by someone fundamentally rotten—the exact same question Big Eyes poses about Walter.

But It can read as complicit in its own excess. Three hours of seduction can feel like you're being seduced, which isn't everyone's idea of a good time.

Synecdoche, New York2008

Like Big Eyes, it's about the gap between what the world sees and what's actually being made—but it's haunted by the possibility that the difference doesn't matter, that all performance is equally real. Where Big Eyes seeks truth, Synecdoche dissolves the question entirely.

Charlie Kaufman's hallucinatory film about a theatre director whose compulsion to document and control life destroys everything. The boundaries between real and performed, authentic and constructed, dissolve. Formally wild, thematically savage about self-deception.

But It's conceptually dense and emotionally punishing. If you want clarity or catharsis, this film actively resists both. Most viewers find it brilliant; some find it insufferable.