| 100 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A triumph.
|
| 100 |
USA Today
One of the year's best movies and certainly its most delightful screen surprise.
|
| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Sun-Times
It is one of the year's best films.
|
| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
Brilliantly acted, sumptuously filmed, and overflowing with mellifluous music.
|
| 100 |
Charlotte Observer
A tribute to anyone who ever picked up a score, a pen, a paintbrush or a grease pencil - or a movie camera.
|
| 100 |
Dallas Observer
A masterful film about the magic of performance and the foibles of the artists behind it.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
Some movies delight you. Some stimulate and provoke. Some enlighten and inform. And some simply hand you a rousing good time-- does all of that and more.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Part of the appeal of Topsy-Turvy is its generosity about human folly and shortcomings. Its wistfulness is very touching.
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
It's as full a movie as you can imagine -- exhausting and exhilarating and continually fascinating.
|
| 90 |
Rolling Stone
The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
A 160 minute work of sustained brilliance and delicacy.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
Janet Maslin
One of those films that create a mix of erudition, pageantry and delectable acting opportunities, much as "Shakespeare in Love."
|
| 90 |
Variety
Deborah Young
This beautifully crafted and lively romp around the 1880s stage world should enjoy its longest life as a vid classic.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.
|
| 90 |
Slate
A monument to process -- to the minutiae of making art -- Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.
|
| 90 |
LA Weekly
We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.
|
| 90 |
Newsweek
Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.
|
| 90 |
Film.com
Leigh and his solid cast make sure that inside jokes translate to a broad audience, and that their rendering of the back-stage drama is smart, engrossing and often very funny.
|
| 89 |
Austin Chronicle
Wildly entertaining, "Shakespeare in Love" minus the Bard and the babe, but with substantive style to burn.
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
A hive of broad, brilliant performances.
|
| 88 |
San Francisco Examiner
Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.
|
| 88 |
Miami Herald
A joyous, amazingly detailed paean to imagination and personal expression that dares -- and succeeds -- to illustrate one of the most mysterious enigmas of all: the creative process.
|
| 88 |
New York Post
Revels in the sensual pleasure of music while capturing brilliantly the tension that grips any theater company before the curtain goes up.
|
| 83 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
At 160 minutes, it's a bit long and uneventful for anyone who is not at least a moderate fan of the musicals.
|
| 81 |
Mr. Showbiz
Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
A bit longer than it might be, a bit more attached to its digressions than we might wish. But the length does encourage the feeling that we've been through the whole creative process with Gilbert and Sullivan .
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
A loving, gently funny and slightly claustrophobic tribute to theatrical life.
|
| 63 |
Boston Globe
In the end, it's the snatches of music, mangled as it is, and the mechanics of staging it, in the absence of Leigh's usual raw, urgent psychic collisions, that keep Topsy-Turvy from seeming merely a gorgeous wax museum.
|
| 50 |
TNT RoughCut
Don Kaye
But there's so much more of the very, very British Topsy-Turvy that just seems so stuffy and inert.
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