American Beauty

The 2006 Sundance Film Festival darling, Little Miss Sunshine marks the directorial debut of husband-and-wife team Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. Michael Arndt's script, which follows the dysfunctional Hoover family as they travel from New Mexico to California to attend the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant, never sacrifices humanity for cheap gags. Performances by Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, and Alan Arkin, as a heroin-addicted grandfather, are superb. But the movie belongs to Abigail Breslin, who plays seven-yearold Olive, the beauty-pageant hopeful. The movie manages to depict family heartache and insecurity while mixing in porn and Proust jokes. As Paul Dano's character notes, "Life is one fucking beauty contest after another." DAN BEERS