/> Starring Greg Kinear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin, Abigail Breslin, Paul Dano, Steve Carrell
Directed by Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
Rating: ****

There are films that take your breath away. Then there are those that give breath back to your forever-breathless life.

Little Miss Sunshine is one of the most wonderful slice-of-life stories to have floated into sight since man invented the motion-picture camera....and the baggage of humanitarian activities that have followed thereafter on the large and big screen.

In league with Life Is Beautiful and A Beautiful Mind, Little Miss Sunshine is a road movie that takes a largely-untrodden road.

The malfunctional family consisting of stressed parents, a boy who doesn't speak because he has nothing to say, a little girl who dreams of winning a beauty contest, a gay uncle who lately attempted suicide, but instead lost a limb, and a raunchy randy grandpa (Alan Arkin, in a richly-deserved Oscar –winning performance)...

The cauldron of family values simmers and slithers across a skyline that takes the family on a journey which we aren't likely to forget easily.

The thing about Little Miss Sunshine is its strangely authentic tone of narration. You can't pinpoint what makes the characters so endearing in their infinite resonances of realism. No one TRIES to be natural...or anything else for that matter. These are achingly simple normal middleclass people who get trapped in bizarre situations.

Frenetic in pace, and yet strangely quiet at heart, Little Miss Sunshine digs out the dignity of the working class from the deepest recesses of the narrative's serio-comic soul.

The performances are extraordinarily rich in saying things that we don't need to be told. The whole journey by a rickety mini-van to the beauty contest where the little girl does her saucy number, is undertaken the spirit of utter unselfconsciousness.

There might have been films with a better grip over the technical aspects of cinema. But none that goes straight for the heart and fills us with a natural sunshine.