With this week's box office totals dipping even further than last week's tepid take, I thought it might be more useful to look beyond the top ten in this Film Forum, turning attention to smaller releases that have either grabbed headlines with wins at recent awards ceremonies or grabbed the attention of Christian reviewers as subjects of debate.

Hailed as the year's best film by the New York Film Critics Circle, Topsy-Turvy has also garnered praise among Christian critics. Director Mike Leigh delivers this comic biography on the lives of British playwrights Gilbert and Sullivan and their creation of The Mikado. The Phantom Tollbooth's J. Robert Parks calls it a "rare creature that both tickles the funny bone and stimulates the gray matter," especially the way Leigh's stylized script "forces us to contemplate how each man used the theater to modify, appropriate and escape from the outside world." John Adair of Preview was also impressed with the script, particularly how it "cleverly intersperses musical numbers from rehearsals and performances to show how The Mikado came to be, instead of showing the whole musical at the end." And while Adair thought the movie was "a fun and enjoyable experience for music lovers," he also liked the acknowledged reality that "all of life's problems do not go away, even when you the hottest entertainers in all of England." Movieguide, however, felt that this darker side of the story wasn't well executed. "Cutting out most, if not all, of such material would not only make this 160-minute movie more moral and historically accurate, but also more entertaining and better paced." It did agree, though, that the film was "quite entertaining."

Janet McTeer won a Best Actress ...