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Examined Life

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Canada · 2008
1h 27m
Director Astra Taylor
Starring Cornel West, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Peter Singer
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?

60

Los Angeles Times by

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.

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.

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.

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.

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