Little Miss Sunshine

As per small, indie-comedy requirement, this family is dysfunctional. Brother Frank (Steve Carrell) has just attempted suicide. Sister Sheryl (Toni Collette) thinks that a bucket of chicken and a liter of Sprite every night at the dinner table is a well-rounded meal. Brother-in-law Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a tract-home inspirational speaker. Nephew Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a Nietzsche-obsessed teen who has taken a vow of silence until he gets accepted to the Naval Academy as a fighter pilot. Gramps (Alan Arkin) is a porn junkie who snorts heroin in the bathroom. And then there is Olive (Abigail Breslin), a dumpling of a little girl who seeks to assume the eponymous crown in a prepubescent beauty pageant in California. They clamber into the family VW bus, leaving Albuquerque, N.M., for the Golden State to make the deadline for entry in the pageant. When they arrive at the Redondo Beach hotel, they find that their silly dysfunctional ways are comparably straight out of a Family Circus panel as they are exposed to the Manson Family Circus ways of the Little Miss beauty competitions.