Enlighten Up!: Critic Reviews

Enlighten Up! explores its subject with a light touch and welcome sense of humor.

As a movie, Enlighten Up! doesn't really go anywhere.

Its director winds up focusing on the least interesting/most predictable tension of them all, that which arises between herself and her handpicked, inflexible star.

The breezy title of this engaging documentary suggests that it isn't going to solve the big questions of life, but will at least treat its subject -- yoga in its many forms from the sublime to the utterly absurd -- with humor and an open spirit.

Enlighten Up! is a low-key, charming trip.

This is a peaceful kind of film, not terribly eventful, but I suppose we wouldn't want a yoga thriller. Relax. Let it happen. Or not.

When Nick encounters B.K.S. Iyengar, the legendary guruji and one of the foremost figures of yoga, Churchill's mostly lightweight film radiates some spiritual light.

Well-crafted pic traverses the globe, interviewing a who's-who of gurus and investigating a wide range of regimens -- with Rosen as both questioner and body-contorting guinea pig.

Director Kate Churchill ends up with a non-story in her feature Enlighten Up! when her subject fails to experience the changes she had been expecting.

What's Rosen's dating life got to do with yoga? Nothing really, beyond a director's last-ditch attempt to show dramatic tension in her film before it peters out into inconclusiveness.

Weirdly, it's the documentarian who seems to unravel throughout.

Give director Churchill credit for including her own obstinacy in the movie

In the end, both the believer and the skeptic end up less sure of their beliefs than they were when they started. Which must be at least a small step towards true enlightenment, right?

While Enlighten Up! is ultimately just a surface look at yoga, it's still interesting, if not exactly enlightening, to watch the true believer and the jaded New York journo clash their way down the road to, one hopes, some sort of spiritual resolution.

When she inserts herself into the action, she reveals only her own insecurity. It ends up being very enlightening, but probably not in the way Churchill intends.

There's a lot of talk about the downward-facing dog in Enlighten Up, a yoga documentary I'm giving the downward-facing thumb.

What Enlighten Up illustrates about the dynamic between filmmaker and subject is even more interesting than what it says about yoga.

While Enlighten Up! is entertaining and provocative regardless, it's too bad that Churchill was so focused on whether Rosen was having his preconceptions shattered that she never stopped to consider her own.

Rosen makes a good correlative for all of us who don't doubt that flexibility and fitness are worthy goals but who cringe at some of the quasi-religious babble that seems inextricably bound up with yoga.

The premise ends up muddling a movie that might have been enlightening.

Director Kate Churchill's acknowledged struggles to impose a story on ... six months' worth of documentary footage is not particularly successful...

A pleasure in its open-mindedness. If you're up for a safe, light, skeptic's look into the many variations of modern yoga, take a peek.

What elevates the movie is the refusal of Rosen -- a grounded, non-believing pragmatist - to make the conversion to yoga spirituality and bliss that Churchill so wants for him, and for the arc of her documentary.

A modest, sublime look at the search for truth

An alternatively funny and revealing flick which dares to knock some seemingly sacrosanct gurus off their lofty pedestals.