The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
The film presents a series of documentary events about a global company called Theranos, a multi-billion dollar technology company. The founder of that company was a girl named Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest billionaire of self-employed females. Elizabeth never expected that her company would collapse, but the massive fraud that caused her company to collapse completely.
19 August 1946, Hope, Arkansas, USA
27 May 1923, Fürth, Bavaria, Germany
5 June 1941, Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
9 January 1913, Yorba Linda, California, USA
September 8, 1950 in Pullman, Washington, USA
June 22, 1933 in San Francisco, California, USA
13 December 1920, New York City, New York, USA
10 February 1955, Germantown, Pennsylvania, USA
26 September 1981, Saginaw, Michigan, USA
6 February 1911, Tampico, Illinois, USA
7 January 1957, Arlington, Virginia, USA
February 3, 1984 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA
4 August 1961, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
5 January 1942, Henderson, North Carolina, USA
20 November 1942, Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA
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23 October 1953, New York City, New York, USA
11 March 1931, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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January 8, 1958 in Holland, Michigan, USA
March 19, 2019
The Inventor does a lot of telling but not a lot of showing. We still don't know Holmes any better at the end. Is she just an invention too?March 18, 2019
The Inventor is a fascinating look at a person who lives by the George Costanza mantra "It's not a lie if you believe it." Only this isn't Monk's Diner, and the stakes couldn't have been higher.March 18, 2019
Like most any Alex Gibney film, this one is sleek, well-produced, focused and journalistic. But The Inventor, given the Gibney-perfect subject, is a little surprising in its softness. As competent as it is, the film just doesn't bite very hard.March 19, 2019
But where the film loses any potency it might have had is in emphasizing the nobility of Holmes's professed mission.March 18, 2019
Gibney finds himself unable to show why Holmes was such a compelling figure. Instead, the viewer is lost in an endless maze of dry re-enactments and footage from Theranos promos and interviews.March 19, 2019
In the end, Holmes remains the complex, magnetic, repulsive, odd, completely watchable star of a thriller that's ongoing.March 15, 2019
The Inventor has an ethereal atmosphere, enhanced in no small way by Will Bates's music, and conforms to Mr. Gibney's usual M.O.March 19, 2019
We all want something to believe in-and, as Gibney suggests, if nothing worthy of our belief presents itself, we'll make do with a ripping yarn.March 19, 2019
In his penetrating new HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney weighs Holmes' alleged fraud in the context of the fantasyland that is Silicon Valley.March 19, 2019
Perhaps a ten-hour-long, O.J.: Made in America-style docuseries could satisfyingly address the systematic, cultural context of Elizabeth Holmes; that's not this film by a long shot.March 14, 2019
Like a lot of Gibney documentaries, it compresses a juicy, complicated story into a smooth, coherent retelling that occasionally glances at that story's deeper implications.March 19, 2019
Gibney urges us to look Holmes in the eyes for two hours.