Alliance Films found its way to the top of more than one box-office chart last week, thanks to its pickup The Golden Compass and L’âge des ténèbres.

New Line Cinema’s Compass pulled in $3.2 million for the week ending Dec. 13, placing first among all titles, while Denys Arcand’s latest led the Canadian crowd, grossing some $414,000 from 83 Quebec screens.

Both films had pre-release problems — the French press has taken a dim view of Arcand’s Ténèbres, while Compass has been criticized in some quarters for its supposed atheist message — but, together with some smaller titles, made Alliance the distributor to beat on both charts.

The full-week numbers for Ténèbres are considerably higher than those of its opening weekend, suggesting that fans kept coming into the week, and that positive word-of-mouth is spreading in Quebec.

Alliance also placed on the overall chart with the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men, which came in fourth, and the thriller Awake from the Weinstein Company, which hung on at eighth after two weeks in theaters.

Sharkwater — the eco-doc that paid off so well for Alliance during the spring and summer — returned and placed second among Canadian titles with a still-stellar per-screen average of $8,100. The week also saw the release, through Mongrel Media, of Walk All Over Me, though the kink-flavored thriller did not make the same impression as the sharks or Arcand. Walk debuted in fourth place, grossing just over $10,000 from three screens in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.