Life in a Day

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

(PG-13)

***

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The best way to experience Kevin Macdonald’s singular new documentary is “to simply let it wash over you,” said Andrew Pulver in the London Guardian. To generate a portrait of human life, Macdonald solicited videos filmed last July 24 by YouTube users around the globe, then distilled 4,500 hours of their footage into a record of that randomly chosen day. “At its best, the amalgam of footage works like a rhythmic visual poem, with sections structured beautifully to musical accompaniment.” Occasionally, “the blizzard of images becomes a bewildering blur.” Macdonald’s eye “gives the work its shape,” said Dave Calhoun in Time Out London. By cutting from such quotidian routines as using the toilet to such life-defining moments as giving birth, the director seems to be trying to impress on us that “the banal and the extraordinary are equally valid” modes of experience. The best moment comes last, said Anthony Quinn in the London Independent. It’s the video diary of a girl who confesses that nothing much happened to her last July 24. Her words express at once her “fear of insignificance” and “her gratitude at being alive.”