Little Miss Sunshine

Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine follows several eccentric characters, including Toni Collette’s Sheryl, Steve Carell’s Frank, Abigail Breslin’s Olive, and Alan Arkin’s Edwin, as they embark on a cross-country journey to a children’s beauty pageant. Filmmakers Dayton and Faris, armed with Michael Arndt’s screenplay, deliver a continuously engrossing endeavor that gets off to a memorable (and instantly-captivating) start, as the movie opens with a stirring stretch that effectively establishes the compelling. well-developed characters and their off-kilter environs – with the appealing atmosphere heightened by Tim Suhrstedt’s stylish visuals and several Oscar-worthy performances. (The uniformly terrific efforts of the various actors goes a long way towards perpetuating the movie’s compulsively watchable feel, as does the irresistible chemistry between their respective characters.) There’s little doubt that Little Miss Sunshine‘s almost episodic midsection has been filled to the brim with entertaining, spellbinding scenes and sequences, and it’s worth noting, too, that Dayton and Faris do a fantastic job of balancing the script’s proliferation of comedic and dramatic elements – as the picture is often as laugh-out-loud funny as it is emotionally devastating. By the time the frenetic and completely satisfying third act rolls around, Little Miss Sunshine has cemented its place as a near flawless contemporary masterpiece that contains few, if any, underwhelming attributes.

**** out of ****