Little Miss Sunshine – 7.9

Abigail Breslin snags the Best Amazingly-Not-Annoying Child Performance Award of 2006 as Olive, a sweet, potbellied 10-year-old whose dream of winning the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant sends her family on a roadtrip from New Mexico to California.  The film charters the well-worn territory of quirky family pics, but the filmmakers treat each character, however farfetched or flawed, with a surprising, unassuming tenderness.  There’s a host of wonderful performances here, including the ever-dependable Toni Collette as the mother, and Steve Carell as the suicidal uncle, who boasts that he was once the “world’s foremost Proust scholar” (which may become the new “I wrote a hit play”).  Even the film’s inevitable talent-competition climax is winning: The scene of Olive and her family dancing on-stage in front of a horror-stricken audience of redneck pageant regulars gets one of the most deserving laughs of the year.  Little Miss Sunshine may have more ambitious older siblings (The Squid and the Whale, Junebug, and The Royal Tenenbaums, to name a few), and it unfairly bears the burden of overpraise during a miserable movie season, but appreciated on its own terms, it’s a joyful, terrific little film.