Critic Reviews

Once it finally begins to focus on the mission, however, This Changes Everything not only becomes engrossing but reveals itself as a crucial cri de coeur.

Donahue’s film goes down the rabbit hole on a few subjects, which cause the film to drift a bit, almost to the point of mission creep. It tends to lean most heavily on the directing ranks, even though actresses are the vast bulk of its eyewitnesses.

Ultimately, This Changes Everything is a mainline to the first-hand experience of those who work and exist outside the white male umbrella. And because of that, it’s an exercise in storytelling that evolves quickly into a valuable lesson for anyone who purports to be a feminist, an ally or a film and television lover. You’ll never watch either the same way again.

Chances are, if you work in Hollywood, This Changes Everything won’t teach you anything you don’t already know. But that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful to hear it articulately communicated by some of the most respected women in the business.

The documentary This Changes Everything synthesizes all that data along with interviews from a truly mind-boggling array of A-listers both in front of and behind the camera to create a damning portrait of Hollywood’s systematic sexism and discrimination. In between, we see clips from both movies and television that illustrate the film’s points in amusing and often striking ways.

There are some tonal problems here, particularly around the way the film tends to homogenize very disparate views and opinions into one sweet, easily digestible polemical smoothie.

Perhaps inevitably because it is dealing with a big issue, This Changes Everything suffers a bit from being all over the map, touching so many bases that, though each is important, they don’t all cohere into a whole.

This Changes Everything may not actually change anything (especially considering that it, too, is directed by a man), but there’s hope that it will at least galvanize more allies, so that there will be more of them in Hollywood than not. That’s a start.