Little Miss Sunshine

Here’s what you need to make a Sundance hit: a script with gags involving Nietzsche, porn, a pilfered corpse, and an all-star cast that includes Alan Arkin and Steve Carell…as a suicidal, gay Proust scholar. ”It was definitely a different way for me to go,” Carell chuckles. The ensemble comedy that was the toast of Park City follows an oddball clan, led by Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear, as they race across three states to get their daughter (Abigail Breslin) to a beauty pageant. ”It has a sweetness,” says Valerie Faris, who codirected the movie with husband Jonathan Dayton. ”If it weren’t for everything I love about it — the raunchiness, the language — it would make a [great] family film!”