Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 2 ratings
A family loaded with quirky, colorful characters piles into an old van and road trips to California for little Olive to compete in a beauty pageant.
Little Miss Sunshine excels most obviously in its ensemble performances — Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano, and Abigail Breslin all deliver richly textured, lived-in work that elevates what could have been quirky-indie clichés into genuinely felt characters. The ending pageant sequence is memorably audacious and earns its emotional payoff, balancing absurdist comedy with real heart. The plot follows a fairly familiar dysfunctional-family-road-trip arc and doesn't stray far from indie-drama conventions of its era, keeping it at a solid but not exceptional level. Cinematography is competent and warm without being especially distinctive. Novelty is moderate — the film blends its ingredients with considerable charm and wit, but the quirky indie family dramedy formula was well-trodden by 2006, and it doesn't reinvent the form so much as execute it very well.