Big Eyes

The Next Reel Film Podcast · Mar 5, 2026 · 1h · transcript

“Sadly, people don’t buy lady art.”

A painter's work becomes the center of a husband's fraudulent claim. We close out the True Lies series with Big Eyes, Tim Burton's biographical drama about artist Margaret Keane, whose distinctive big-eyed waif paintings were claimed by her controlling husband Walter throughout the 1950s and 60s. The story unfolds against mid-century gender dynamics, when women artists faced skepticism in the commercial art world and wives' agency within marriages was culturally constrained—context that shapes Margaret's complicity in the fraud.

We argue about Burton's…