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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
A modest, intermittently engaging film.
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.
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.
Slovenian-born writer-teacher Slavoj Zizek, narrator of the movie "A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema," provides the most entertainment.
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.