Death By Lightning

Can a documentary reveal the truth about someone who has made a career out of deception? This week on Moving Histories, John, Kim, and Robert explore Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything, a provocative documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that blurs the boundaries between observation, performance, and manipulation. From the psychology of corporate fraud to the aesthetics of surveillance and reenactment, we ask whether seeing everything really means understanding anything—and what happens when the filmmaker becomes part of the story.

This week on Moving Histories, we're heading to the top of the world with Jennifer Peedom's Tenzing, a historical drama about Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary's historic 1953 ascent of Mount Everest.We discuss the politics of exploration, Sherpa identity, and the role of the sublime in historical cinema. We also revisit Peedom's documentary Sherpa (2015) to explore how documentary and narrative filmmaking offer different ways of experiencing and understanding history.

What happens when a historical film tries to explain Anthony Bourdain before he became Anthony Bourdain? This week on Moving Histories, John , Robert Burgoyne, and Kim discuss Matt Johnson’s Tony and how the film to explores history, memory, place, and, of course, food. We also ask a more fundamental question: does Tony actually illuminate the person Bourdain became, or does knowing that person make the film seem more meaningful than it really is? Suffice it to say, the three of us have some thoughts.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings one of history's oldest stories to the screen, but what does it reveal about myth, memory, and historical storytelling? Joined by renowned classicist Monica Cyrino, we explore Nolan's adaptation, revisit the ideas from our Oppenheimer episode about Nolan as a historian, and discuss why Homer continues to shape cinema nearly three thousand years later.

This week on Moving Histories, we sit down with director Anthony Maras to discuss his powerful new historical drama Pressure. Together, we explore how cinema can make history feel lived rather than merely observed, and why environment, atmosphere, and sensory experience matter just as much as events themselves when telling stories about the past.

In our latest episode, we unpack the Brazilian political thriller The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and starring Wagner Moura. 

History usually remembers the rock stars—Lincoln, Washington, the giants—but Death by Lightning shifts the camera toward the hustlers, dreamers, and delusional outsiders who actually move the machinery of history. In this episode, we explore how the series turns the assassination of James Garfield into a strange and revealing thought experiment about fame, failure, and the fragile human ecosystem behind American history.

History doesn’t sit still in The Testament of Ann Lee—it moves, sings, and repeats itself through bodies in motion. This week, we explore how belief becomes choreography and how cinema turns the past into a living performance. 

Listen as we explore Richard Linklater's latest film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard's radical masterpiece Breathless. 

We end 2025 with a discussion on Chloe Zhao’s new film Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical fiction novel.