Filled with delicious backstage drama, and superb actors reveling in the opportunity to play their 19th-century counterparts.
Topsy-Turvy
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom, United States · 1999
Rated R · 2h 40m
Director Mike Leigh
Starring Allan Corduner, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Dexter Fletcher
Genre Comedy, Drama, Music
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After their production, “Princess Ida,” meets with less-than-stunning reviews, the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan is strained to breaking. Their friends and associates attempt to convince the two to work together again. A monument to the process of making art, filled with delicious backstage drama.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
A monument to process -- to the minutiae of making art -- Topsy-Turvy leaves you upside down and breathless.
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.
We never seem to be looking at actors, but at people; never at scenes, but at life unrehearsed.
Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
A hive of broad, brilliant performances.
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Thoroughly researched, unobtrusively upholstered, this beautifully assured entertainment about Victorian England is a string of delights.
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
Wildly entertaining, "Shakespeare in Love" minus the Bard and the babe, but with substantive style to burn.
One of the year's best movies and certainly its most delightful screen surprise.
Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea
A triumph.
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