The Laboratorium : Little Miss Sunshine

A profoundly dysfunctional family takes a road-trip in a dying VW bus so that the daughter can compete in a beauty pageant, and the resulting movie is a wonderfully understated black comedy. This is what They mean when They talk about “character-driven humor”; almost all of the laughs come when one of the six main characters either tips over into misanthropy or papers over it, each in his or her own distinctive way. The acting is uniformly superb, particularly Steve Carell as a Proust scholar on suicide watch and Abigail Breslin as an entirely convincing nine-year-old. I also loved the well-modulated cinematography, which features lots of well-chosen tracking shots and an elegant palette.