Topsy-Turvy

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A triumph.

USA Today Mike Clark

One of the year's best movies and certainly its most delightful screen surprise.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Topsy-Turvy reminds us that, in any age, creative expression is at once the most personal and most communal of enterprises.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It is one of the year's best films.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Brilliantly acted, sumptuously filmed, and overflowing with mellifluous music.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A tribute to anyone who ever picked up a score, a pen, a paintbrush or a grease pencil - or a movie camera.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

A masterful film about the magic of performance and the foibles of the artists behind it.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

Part of the appeal of Topsy-Turvy is its generosity about human folly and shortcomings. Its wistfulness is very touching.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's as full a movie as you can imagine -- exhausting and exhilarating and continually fascinating.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The year's most beguilling and touching surprise. Bravo.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

A 160 minute work of sustained brilliance and delicacy.

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."

Variety Deborah Young

This beautifully crafted and lively romp around the 1880s stage world should enjoy its longest life as a vid classic.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.

Slate David Edelstein

A monument to process -- to the minutiae of making art -- Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.

Newsweek David Ansen

Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Wildly entertaining, "Shakespeare in Love" minus the Bard and the babe, but with substantive style to burn.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A hive of broad, brilliant performances.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Mike Leigh's great big, superbly performed homage to the creative process.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

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.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Revels in the sensual pleasure of music while capturing brilliantly the tension that grips any theater company before the curtain goes up.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

At 160 minutes, it's a bit long and uneventful for anyone who is not at least a moderate fan of the musicals.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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 .

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

A loving, gently funny and slightly claustrophobic tribute to theatrical life.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

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.

TNT RoughCut Don Kaye

But there's so much more of the very, very British Topsy-Turvy that just seems so stuffy and inert.