Film

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley

Alex Gibney's clinical, unnervingly calm dissection of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, built from company footage, courtroom testimony and interviews with the whistleblowers who paid for their doubts. It plays less like a thriller and more like a slow-motion autopsy of belief — how a blood-testing machine that barely worked convinced boards, journalists and patients for a decade. Essential for anyone fascinated by charisma weaponised as evidence.

TMDb rating7.0

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The Dropout2022

Amanda Seyfried's Holmes is uncanny — the voice, the unblinking stare, the slow curdle from true believer into someone who can't stop lying. It fills in the human interior Gibney's film mostly withholds.

But Eight hours is a lot of time inside one woman's self-delusion; some found it repetitive by episode six.

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Fyre2019

Same decade, same Silicon Valley bravado, wildly smaller stakes and infinitely more embarrassing footage — a festival collapsing in real time while its founder keeps lying to camera crews.

But Thinner and trashier than The Inventor; there's no real mystery here, just watching someone get caught.

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Icarus2017

Gibney's own Oscar winner, made around the same time, about a doping investigation that accidentally exposes a state-run fraud machine. Same director, same nose for institutions protecting a lie.

But Starts as a personal experiment and swerves into geopolitics — the tonal whiplash isn't for everyone.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

F for Fake1973

Gibney's Holmes convinces herself and everyone else that a fiction is real; Welles, a former hoaxer himself, spends this film asking why we want to believe con artists at all — the same question, forty-six years earlier, from inside the con.

Orson Welles's essay film about a legendary art forger and a hoax biographer, narrated by a director who once faked a Martian invasion on the radio. Playful, self-implicating, endlessly clever.

But Deliberately slippery and non-linear — if you want a clean argument or timeline, this will frustrate you.

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More like this (8)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room2005

The template for this whole genre: smart, furious, and still the best film about how a company can lie to everyone, including itself, for years before anyone notices.

But The financial mechanics get dense in the middle third if you don't already know how energy trading works.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room poster

WeCrashed2022

WeWork's Adam Neumann is Holmes's cousin in delusion — a founder who believed his own mythology so completely that reality became an inconvenience. Jared Leto goes fully unhinged with it.

But Plays its true story for camp more than tragedy; less interested in the damage than in the spectacle.

WeCrashed poster

Dirty Money2018

Gibney executive-produces this anthology series, each episode a different scam — payday loans, maple syrup cartels, Volkswagen's emissions cheat. If The Inventor hooked you, this is the buffet version.

But Quality varies episode to episode since different directors handle each one; a couple are forgettable.

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McMillion$2020

A six-part HBO romp through the McDonald's Monopoly scam, run for a decade by an ex-cop who rigged the whole promotion. Funnier and pulpier than anything in Holmes's story.

But Low stakes compared to Theranos — nobody's health was on the line, just everyone's faith in a fry box.

McMillion$ poster

The Tinder Swindler2022

Same psychology, personal scale: a con man performs wealth and love instead of medical breakthroughs, and educated, careful women hand over their savings anyway. Deeply upsetting and hard to stop watching.

But Slicker and more sensational than Gibney's film; it wants your outrage more than your understanding.

The Tinder Swindler poster

LuLaRich2021

The MLM version of the same story — true believers, a charismatic founder, and a business model that mathematically cannot work, told with real affection for the women who got taken in.

But Smaller-scale and more sympathetic to its subjects; less interested in exposing fraud than mourning what it cost people.

LuLaRich poster

Catch Me If You Can2002

Same mechanism as Theranos — a young, unqualified person talks their way past experts who should have caught them sooner — but restaged as breezy entertainment instead of indictment, which tells you something about how differently we forgive men and women for it.

Spielberg turns a charismatic fraudster loose in a candy-colored, jazzy 1960s and dares you to root for him anyway — the same seductive-liar-fools-every-institution engine as Holmes's story, but played for pure pleasure.

But Glossy and forgiving where Gibney's film is angry; it treats fraud as a caper, not a crime with victims.

Catch Me If You Can poster

Wild Wild Country2018

Swap the blood-testing machine for a religion and the boardroom for a desert commune, and you get the same true subject as The Inventor: how a magnetic leader can make smart people abandon their own eyes, and how long a lie can survive on collective willingness to believe it.

A six-hour Netflix docuseries about an Oregon commune built around a guru and his terrifyingly effective right-hand woman — belief overtaking evidence on an even grander, stranger scale.

But It's long, sprawling, and asks you to sit with moral ambiguity rather than a tidy verdict of guilty.

Wild Wild Country poster

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