Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Directors: Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Abigail Breslin, Paul Dano, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin

A family, each member down on their luck and down in the dumps, decide to make a trip from New Mexico to California to enter the youngest member, Olive, in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant. Along the way, the family must examine their own ambitions, both realized and forgotten, to find some semblance of happiness. "Little Miss Sunshine" offers some very spectacular performances, especially from Breslin, which makes each of the characters very relatable to the audience. Each of the characters possess their own strengths and weaknesses giving them depth that is very rarely seen in films of this nature. The film also offers some very memorable scenes climaxing in its most unforgettable, Olive's perfomance in the pageant. These elements added together make it very hard not to like as well excusing is minor flaws, including its tendency to be too cynical to find funny at times. One can expect to be entertained with this film and find the performances rich with real-life nuances.