Enlighten up!

★★ 1/2 out of four stars

Unrated by the MPAA

Theater: Lagoon.

"Yoga has no simple definition, and that's the beauty of it." So says filmmaker Kate Churchill, who sets out to prove the transformative power of yoga in "Enlighten Up!" Her subject is Nick Rosen, a young New Yorker who is taken on a journey around the world to learn the secret of yoga.

The first part of the film is nothing more than a hodgepodge of visits to yoga centers without any drive. But when Churchill and Rosen travel to India to meet with some of yoga's biggest names, the film kicks into high gear -- and it's all thanks to those two. Rosen doesn't find yoga the spiritual experience Churchill hoped for, and as their journey continues, their relationship becomes strained and compulsively watchable.

Appearances from yoga's biggest gurus are certainly valuable, but the true message of "Enlighten Up!" is really coping with failed expectations -- and it's fascinating.

ANDREW NEWMAN

Rating: PG for violence, language, thematic material and brief smoking.

This is an ultra-low-budget retelling of the classic Jack London story. Here, a spoiled city girl, Ryan (Ariel Gade), visits her grandfather (Christopher Lloyd) at his home in Montana. She hates the small town until she discovers a wounded dog named Buck. Through a plot contrivance not worth summarizing, she needs to race the town bully to keep her dog.

Despite the amateurish nature of the movie, whose performances range from downright awful to loads of fun (Lloyd and the great Wes Studi), "Wild" works. The story is compelling, and there are some very tough lessons learned by adults and kids alike. Worth a matinee on a rainy afternoon.

PETER SCHILLING

0 out of four stars

Theater: St. Anthony Main.

If "Break" deserves credit for being a low-budget indie thriller with some well known names in the cast (including the late David Carradine in a salacious few minutes of screen time), that's about all it deserves. Writer/director Marc Clebanoff has ambitiously attempted to refashion the standard noir story line of an isolated hit man torn between his forbidden love and his foul duty, but the drama is trite and the romance is preposterous.

Sadly, the acting and production values are even worse. It's like an experimental episode of a bad soap opera, where the characters are labeled instead of named (the Man, the Woman, the Lawyer, the China Man, etc.) and the dialogue is littered with clichés. The only bright spots are a few comical fight scenes and a bodyguard named Haiku who, wouldn't you know it, speaks only in haiku. If Clebanoff's filmmaking career doesn't pan out, he ought to try his hand at poetry.