Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Directed by

Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

Genre

drama film, comedy film, road movie

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 38m

Rated

R

Rating

7.7 of 10 from 7,917 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A dysfunctional family piles into a van to drive their young daughter to a child beauty pageant. Along the way they deal with personal failures and frustrations but end up supporting one another.

heartfeltquirkybittersweetpoignantfunny-sadwarmoffbeateccentric

What happens

Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American tragicomedy film directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (in their directorial debut) from a screenplay written by Michael Arndt. The film stars an ensemble cast consisting of Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, and Alan Arkin, all of whom play members of a dysfunctional family taking the youngest (Breslin) to compete in a child beauty pageant. Breslin's breakout performance in the film earned her an Academy Award nomination. The road film tackles themes of family, depression, self-acceptance, and finding meaning in absurd conditions. It was produced by Big Beach Films on a budget of US$8 million. Filming began on June 6, 2005, and took place over 30 days in Arizona and Southern California. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2006, and its distribution rights were bought by Fox Searchlight Pictures for one of the biggest deals made in the history of the festival. The film had a limited release in the United States on July 26, 2006, and expanded to a wider release starting on August 18. Little Miss Sunshine was a box office success, grossing $101 million. It garnered critical praise for its performances, as well as for its directing, screenplay and humor. It earned four nominations at the 79th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Arndt and Arkin won Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, and Breslin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, it won the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Theatrical Motion Picture and received numerous other accolades. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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