Life in a Day Reviews

A slick mishmash of exotica, minutia, and airbrushed platitudes (a lot of babies are born, but how can that be if no one has sex?) that tries to sum up the lives of everybody.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Small parts dazzle but the film succeeds more in theory than practice. It's a fabulous concept, but overall less than the sum of its parts, largely because it slips back and forth between different modes of storytelling.

Full Review | Original Score: C

It's a remarkable achievement, creating something that is meaningful, sad, and often funny from the home movies of thousands of people around the world.

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10

It's all familiar, for the most part, and it's all mildly interesting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

It strives awfully hard for depth but, more often than not, comes off too shallow.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

As an attempt to reflect The Way We Live Now, it falls short in a few key ways.

Full Review

There are dull spots, as with any other day, yet "Life" aims to be, and occasionally is, like a YouTube-y "Our Town," giving a sense of what it is to be alive on planet Earth.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Despite having no conventional narrative, other than the sleeping, waking, rising, bathing, eating and living cycles of ordinary people across the globe, "Life in a Day" is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Some of the material is banal, especially upon a second viewing. Some of it undoubtedly represents great acting by canny contributors. But the vast majority of the film feels undeniably real and incredibly inspiring.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Judging by the National Geographic doc "Life in a Day," a lot of nothing happened on July 24, 2010.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

"Life in a Day" is "Koyaanisqatsi" minus the consistent visual imagination that made that film bearable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

a hell of an experiment

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

"Life in a Day" is at once ambitious in its global reach and modest in its simplicity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Kevin Macdonald's documentary imposes a semblance of unity on a planet of unfathomable diversity.

Full Review

Carved out of cyber-reality and global in reach, this fast-paced documentary is shaped as much by Internet savvy as traditional filmmaking, which doesn't make the experience of it any less satisfying, or the implications any less provocative.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

What could have been a gimmick turns out to be philosophical and heartfelt.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

If nothing else, Life In A Day serves as a fine time capsule, recording some of what life was like on Earth in 2010.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

...a pretty experiment with no apparent results.

Full Review

"Life in a Day" is so intimate and ultimately optimistic, it'll leave you with the inescapable feeling that you've just made hundreds of new friends you've never actually met.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

So freshly edited, the clips so free of the usual YouTube Stupid Human Tricks coyness, that it's easy to get addicted to its clear-eyed celebration of the rituals and dislocating comedy of life in the 21st century.

Full Review | Original Score: B+