Universal, DreamWorks and Imagine Entertainment's PG-13 rated drama A Beautiful Mind -- which has eight Oscar nominations including best picture and saw director Ron Howard win the Directors Guild of America's award Saturday night -- slid one notch to ninth place in its 13th week, still holding well with an ESTIMATED $3.41 million (-12%) at 1,533 theaters (-260 theaters; $2,225 per theater). Its cume is approximately $149.2 million. How far it goes past $150 million will depend on how well it does Oscar night.

Directed by Ron Howard, the Brian Grazer production stars Russell Crowe, Ed Harris and Jennifer Connelly.

Rounding out the Top Ten was Buena Vista/Disney's G rated animated Return to Never Land, down four notches place in its fifth week with a quieter ESTIMATED $2.3 million (-49%) at 1,895 theaters (-603 theaters; $1,197 per theater). Its cume is approximately $45.3 million.

OTHER OPENINGS

This weekend also saw the arrival of Universal's R rated drama Harrison's Flowers to a quiet ESTIMATED $0.84 million at 390 theaters ($2,120 per theater).

Produced and directed by Elie Chouraqui, it stars Andie MacDowell, Elias Koteas, Brendan Gleeson, Adrien Brody and David Strathairn.

IFC Films' unrated erotic drama Y Tu Mama Tambien opened to an encouraging ESTIMATED $0.43 million at 42 theaters ($10,170 per theater).

Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, it stars Maribel Verdu, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna.

Fox Searchlight Pictures' R rated romantic comedy Kissing Jessica Stein arrived to a very sexy ESTIMATED $0.36 million at 26 theaters ($13,650 per theater). Its cume after five days is approximately $0.4 million.

Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, it stars Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen.

"It's a tiny independent film with complete unknowns and we're thrilled," Fox Searchlight distribution president Stephen Gilula said Sunday morning. "It's just working really well everywhere. The screen average is a little misleading (and would be a lot higher except) that we took some suburban and outlying theaters in Chicago and San Francisco. The New York numbers are very, very big and the central runs are quite big everywhere. The New York numbers (have) quite a few theaters in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. Friday and Saturday the Sunset (in Los Angeles) had over $13,000, so they'll be close to $20,000 (for the weekend). I felt that this film had such strong playability that we opened it a little wider and it's working really nicely."

Asked about plans to expand Jessica, Gilula replied, "This week we add 14 cities with 37 screens. We'll be at 65 theaters this Friday. The following week we add another 19 cities and we'll be over 100 screens. In the fourth week, which will be the week of Apr. 5, we expect to be national in all the major and some key cities with 400-500 theaters."

It also helps that Jessica has earned favorable reviews from most critics. "I would say that 80-90 percent are three to four stars," Gilula said. "There's only a couple that didn't care for it. We had a negative New York Times review and were able to survive that because everything else in New York was extremely positive. We're off and running.

"It's one of those Cinderella stories. You know, for every Jessica there's probably a thousand independent films that never see the light of day. For everyone involved in this film, it's like winning the lottery. They had such a tough time. It was turned down by a lot of distributors. It was turned down by Sundance. The conventional wisdom is you can't launch a romantic comedy with unknown stars in it. Where do you go with that? How do you get people to go see it? As you know, we did a word of mouth screening program and the reviewers embraced it. Our gang (at Fox Searchlight) really liked the movie, so we went out and worked it."