Little Miss Sunshine: Critic Reviews

Sorry, folks, but these are not organic characters; they're walking, talking catalogs of screenwriter index-card data.

This bittersweet comedy of dysfunction takes place at the terminus of the American dream, where families are one bad break away from bankruptcy.

Each spike of satire is fitted with a safety-cap of feelgood reassurance.

There is nothing inherently sunny about Little Miss Sunshine, and that's part of the fresh and clever lunacy of this deliciously dark comedy.

Little Miss Sunshine triumphs with acting performances that are, across the board, poignant, smart and real.

It looks at the all-American obsession with winning and chortles darkly. You still come out of the movie wanting to give your family a hug.

Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill.

The destination is a pageant that will demonstrate, in grotesque, stomach-churning detail, that beauty is skin-deep and that you don't have to win to be a winner.

The casting is flawless. Kinnear has never been better suited to a role; Richard's gradual surrender of his ego is sweet and totally convincing. Arkin has the best lines, and delivers them with the timing of a vaudeville pro.

Little Miss Sunshine is a dysfunctional-family comedy with a crucial difference -- the function progresses, hilariously, from dys to full and loving.

... an amusing movie, viciously well-written and brilliantly acted.

Unlike so many films that force life lessons down your throat, Little Miss Sunshine weaves them into the fabric of the story.

A hard-to-resist, often riotous comedy.

Little Miss Sunshine is an enchanting anthem to loserdom -- a dark comedy that piles on setback after setback and yet never loses its helium.

Little Miss Sunshine, a slight but charming movie, is a modest winner.

It's difficult to convey the sheer joy of watching these characters interact.

... this isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it deftly dramatizes our conflicting desires for individuality and an audience to applaud it.

To the extent that Little Miss Sunshine works, and you probably gather that its schematic cartoonishness didn't always work for me, it is because directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris genuinely like these people.

Family-on-the-road comedies rarely burrow so deeply into their characters' personalities or delineate their messy domestic arrangements with such care.

Little Miss Sunshine makes you want to gather all the kooks in your life and take a road trip.

The word 'quirky' is overused, but Little Miss Sunshine deserves the tag. As with Napoleon Dynamite, the quirkiness in this film comes from honest characters, not desperate-to-be-different caricatures in such films as Garden State.

The funniest and most gracefully written, acted and directed dysfunctional-American-family farce comedy of the year thus far.

This is a feel-good movie that is not dependent on gags or stupid gimmicks, but on intelligently observed, slightly cockeyed people and their interactions. It is positive and uplifting, and a grand time is had by all.

A quietly antic dysfunctional family road trip comedy that shoots down the all-American culture of the winner and offers sweet redemption for losers -- or at least the ordinary folks often branded as such.

A smart, dark road comedy about a dysfunctional family that had them rolling in the aisles at this year's Sundance Film Festival.