Our take
This movie tells the story of the 2017 Fyre Music Festival scandal. An event where party-goers, who paid thousands of dollars for luxury hotel accommodation on a Bahamian island, found themselves sleeping in hazard tents left over from the last hurricane disaster, with wonderbread and processed cheese sandwiches. “We were promised arugula!”
The documentary focuses heavily on the person behind the operation, Billy McFarland.
A rival movie, titled Fyre Fraud, was also released on Hulu around the same time. They’re both excellent, but if, like me, you didn’t know about the scandal before hearing about the movie, I wouldn’t suggest bothering with watching both.
The story
He promised supermodels and yachts, but delivered tents and cheese sandwiches. How one man engineered a music festival disaster.
Elsewhere
"What "Fyre" loses in comprehensiveness, it makes up for in immediacy; [Chris] Smith is eager to strike while the iron is hot, but he gives us just enough breathing room to step back and make sense of what happened from a wider perspective."
— David Ehrlich
"[Fyre] is a story of shallow excess-how we're in an era in which how something looks is more important than what it actually is-but it's also a reminder that everything still has a cost."
— Brian Tallerico
The details
Streaming arrival
Who picked it
Bilal Zouheir is the founder of A Good Movie to Watch. He is based in the US and a member of the Nevada Film Critics Society. He grew up in Morocco, where he learned English from watching movies. Bilal's work with A Good Movie to Watch is focused on offering an alternative to streaming algorithms, which are often used as commercial tools by streaming services.
Too long. No sympathy for the rich FOMOs who bought plunked down money due to a slick marketing campaign.