Little Miss Sunshine Reviews
All indie-movie families may start out unhappy in their own way, but by the time the final credits roll, everyone remains complacent, confident of their brood's superiority.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
Sunny or dark, comedy should never be as predictable as Little Miss Sunshine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
... a scrappy human comedy that takes an honest path to laughs and is twice as funny and touching for it.
| Original Score: 3/4
... this isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it deftly dramatizes our conflicting desires for individuality and an audience to applaud it.
Time Out
Top CriticFor a movie generated from the Amerindie algorithm of family dysfunction, road-trip catharsis and studied quirk, this dark-edged ensemble comedy often borders on the loveable.
Hilarious, profane and as much fun as you are going to have in a theater this summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The funniest and most gracefully written, acted and directed dysfunctional-American-family farce comedy of the year thus far.
Dayton and Faris satirize our win-win culture, but they don't miss a trick promoting Little Miss Sunshine for the winner's circle.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Little Miss Sunshine makes you want to gather all the kooks in your life and take a road trip.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Smart and goofy, tender and laugh-out-loud funny, Little Miss Sunshine is the sleeper hit of the summer.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
... an amusing movie, viciously well-written and brilliantly acted.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Unlike so many films that force life lessons down your throat, Little Miss Sunshine weaves them into the fabric of the story.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
To the filmmakers' credit, they don't sugarcoat the creepiness. They mine it for the kind of laughter that makes you feel uncomfortable but also makes you think.
If you think you've seen it all before in a family road movie, you owe it to yourself to see what happens when somebody actually comes up with a few bright ideas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris have pulled off the essential ingredient for this kind of film: a cast that believably creates a family.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
You'll be delighted, if a bit breathless from laughing, to be along for the ride.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Like all superior comedies, this one revolves around wonderful performances.
| Original Score: B+
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It comes closer to the truth about the way people really live -- on the edge of fantasy-driven desperation -- than our sanctimonies permit us to think.
Family-on-the-road comedies rarely burrow so deeply into their characters' personalities or delineate their messy domestic arrangements with such care.
| Original Score: 3/4
Little Miss Sunshine triumphs with acting performances that are, across the board, poignant, smart and real.
A comedy that is both hilarious and bold.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's difficult to convey the sheer joy of watching these characters interact.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sorry, folks, but these are not organic characters; they're walking, talking catalogs of screenwriter index-card data.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Little Miss Sunshine employs razor-sharp humor and a deceptively realistic style to satirize a corrupt society that heroes of low status must navigate by their wits alone.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Little Miss Sunshine isn't the kind of movie you want to beat up on: It's sweet-tempered at its core, and even when it's trying too hard to reinforce its own quirks, the charms of its actors filter through effortlessly.
Little Miss Sunshine is a dysfunctional-family comedy with a crucial difference -- the function progresses, hilariously, from dys to full and loving.
There is nothing inherently sunny about Little Miss Sunshine, and that's part of the fresh and clever lunacy of this deliciously dark comedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
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.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Mining humor from subjects like suicide, drug abuse and bad parenting, the picture isn't going to win any congeniality prizes, but it's amusingly bitter. Consider it summer fun for pessimists and misanthropes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A smart, dark road comedy about a dysfunctional family that had them rolling in the aisles at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
| Original Score: 3/4
Little Miss Sunshine has not a hint of exploitation about it, and it's sentimental only in the best sense of the word. Like its heroine Olive Hoover, it wears its heart on its sleeve and assumes the best about everyone.
This bittersweet comedy of dysfunction takes place at the terminus of the American dream, where families are one bad break away from bankruptcy.
| Original Score: 4/5
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.
Little Miss Sunshine often emits the dulcet quirkiness of such vintage road comedies as Harry and Tonto and Melvin and Howard.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It takes a deft hand to fashion a feel-good movie with plenty of laughs and an upbeat ending out of a story that includes drug addiction, a suicide attempt, a death, Nietzsche, and Proust.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
[Little Miss Sunshine] offers a surprising mix of dark humor and heart, with rich performances from a strong cast.
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.
This indie, a sweet, tart and smart satire about a family of losers in a world obsessed with winning, is an authentic crowd pleaser. There's been no more satisfying American comedy this year.
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.
A brainy blend of farce and heart, this is one of those movies that veteran moviegoers complain they don't make anymore.
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.
