Enlighten Up! (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:34
Fresh:19
Rotten:15
Average Rating:6/10
Consensus: Enlighten Up! is a funny, warmhearted documentary that's uneven in spots, but thought-provoking nonetheless.
Runtime: 82 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Synopsis: Kate Churchill is a filmmaker and a dedicated yoga practitioner who insists that yoga can transform anyone. She decides to prove it. Her plan: select a subject, immerse him in yoga and follow him... [More]
Reviews for Enlighten Up!
| Tomatometer | Critic | Review | Category |
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 1.5/4 |
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. Full Review |
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2.5/5 |
Weirdly, it's the documentarian who seems to unravel throughout. Full Review |
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2/4 |
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. Full Review |
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2/4 |
Give director Churchill credit for including her own obstinacy in the movie Full Review |
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 3/4 |
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? Full Review |
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4/5 |
Enlighten Up! is a low-key, charming trip. Full Review |
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2.5/5 |
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. Full Review |
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2.5/4 |
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. Full Review |
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1.5/4 |
There's a lot of talk about the downward-facing dog in Enlighten Up, a yoga documentary I'm giving the downward-facing thumb. Full Review |
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What Enlighten Up illustrates about the dynamic between filmmaker and subject is even more interesting than what it says about yoga. Full Review |
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C+ |
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. Full Review |
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3/4 |
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. Full Review |
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As a movie, Enlighten Up! doesn't really go anywhere. Full Review |
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2.5/4 |
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. Full Review |
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B |
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. Full Review |
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4/10 |
Director Kate Churchill's acknowledged struggles to impose a story on ... six months' worth of documentary footage is not particularly successful... Full Review |
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2.5/4 |
The premise ends up muddling a movie that might have been enlightening. Full Review |
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3/4 |
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. Full Review |
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3/4 |
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. Full Review |
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3/4 |
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. Full Review |
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