✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada · 2008
1h 27m
Director Astra Taylor
Starring Cornel West, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Peter Singer
Genre Documentary
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
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.
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.
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.
15 years of imprisonment, 5 days of vengeance...
At what moment do we begin to live?
Two bodies. Two minds. One soul.
When humans invade a distant planet, a man sent to study the indigenous aliens struggles to choose sides.
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek examines the hidden themes and existential questions asked by world renowned films.
A young mother raises her 5-year-old son in captivity and struggles to answer his mounting questions.
The celebration of a lifetime!
A faded television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame in the final years of Hollywood's Golden Age.
A failed stand-up comedian is driven insane, turning to a life of crime in chaos in Gotham City.
Not man. Not machine. More.
When a young woman, Bella, is reanimated by an eccentric physician, she begins her life anew, exploring the pleasures of the world.
Fired because of her age, Elisabeth Sparkle begins taking "the substance," a black-market drug that will make her young again.