Say hello to the new American nuclear family. Fractured, bitter, psychologically unstable yet completely lovable.

In Little Miss Sunshine twists of fortune send the Hoover family road-tripping across three states to enter seven year old Olive (Abigail Breslin) in a beauty pageant. The mode of transport is a canary VW Bus, that wheeled icon of freedom and opportunity. Not surprisingly the bus is showing the same signs of age as the idealism that forged it.

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s first feature film is about the pageantry we all endure or espouse, ludicrous pretension, and in the end family. It’s well acted, wonderfully tight (perfect run-time of about 100 min!) and completely hilarious. Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette are perfect as the parents and Steve Carrell does well to show versatility as the “top Proust scholar in America.”

Also catch the well-placed melodies of DeVotchKa, a band I’ve been enjoying for quite a while. Go see this film; if every movie in the theaters today was this good as Sunshine I’d miss them quite a bit more than I do now.