75
New York Post by V.A. Musetto
Slovenian-born writer-teacher Slavoj Zizek, narrator of the movie "A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema," provides the most entertainment.
Examined Life
Critic Rating
(read reviews)User Rating
- Canada
- 2008
- · 87m
Director
Astra Taylor
Cast
Cornel West,
Judith Butler,
Slavoj Žižek,
Peter Singer,
Michael Hardt,
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Genre
Documentary
Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms and puts it back on the streets. The film showcases eight influential modern philosophers walking around New York and other metropolises, discussing the practical application of their ideas in contemporary culture. Examined Life reveals philosophy's power to transform how we see the world around us.
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What are critics saying?
70
Variety
Stimulating film, enlivened by creative location shooting.
70
Salon by Andrew O'Hehir
By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O.
70
Village Voice by J. Hoberman
Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.
70
Variety by Rob Nelson
Stimulating film, enlivened by creative location shooting.
63
Boston Globe by Wesley Morris
Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.
60
Los Angeles Times
It won't be everybody's idea of entertainment but the heady documentary "Examined Life" provides a sound forum for an influential cross-section of professional thinkers to theorize on such weighty topics as life and death, politics, the environment and disabilities.
60
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
A modest, intermittently engaging film.
60
Los Angeles Times by Gary Goldstein
It won't be everybody's idea of entertainment but the heady documentary "Examined Life" provides a sound forum for an influential cross-section of professional thinkers to theorize on such weighty topics as life and death, politics, the environment and disabilities.
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