Metacritic reviews

Life in a Day 2020 is an affirmation of life, of the simple joys experienced by citizens of the planet over the course of a single day. We’d never have met any of them without this film, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to get to know them a little bit.

There are so many rich, colorful scenes that it’s a worthy watch just as an ethnographic record of our planet in a moment of time.

Even as the concept of crowdsourcing isn’t as novel as it was at the time of the film’s predecessor and the 90-minute running time can feel unnecessarily expansive given the repetition of those pandemic-related sequences, “Life in a Day 2020” nevertheless serves as a telling time capsule. The world has never felt so compact.

Macdonald and his team pull out enough affecting stories to hold your interest, whose scopes range from sweeping to intimate.

The material may be slicker but the novelty of the format has faded.

Life in a Day 2020 is quick to fall back on tidy montage methods — grouped shots of babies being born, skydivers jumping from planes, believers grouped in prayer, mourners in cemeteries — that rather strenuously force a sense of global communion, rather than seeking and stressing life’s more diverse and disorienting juxtapositions.

You’re not likely to find a more jarring — and ultimately exhausting — collision of high pretension and low execution at Sundance this year than the crowdsourced YouTube doc Life in a Day 2020.