~ The best comedy of the year ~. Review on Little Miss Sunshine Movie

Dir: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris. Cast: Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carrell, Alan Arkin, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin.

As a general rule, I've found films that pretentiously invoke maudin German philosophers or verbose French novelists in the name of comedy are best avoided. The only exceptions are mid-period Woody Allen and now Little Miss Sunshine, which, despite namechecking both Nietsche and Proust inside the first five minutes, quickly turns out to be an engaging and funny story.

Basically, it's a comic road movie, a genre which has become highly popular in recent years. We've had Jack Nicholson driving off to find the meaning of life in a giant motor home in About Schmidt; Bill Murray revisiting ex-girlfriends in an under-powered Ford Taurus in Broken Flowers, and Paul Giamati and Thomas Haden Church belnding fine wines with fine women in a Saab convertible in Sideways.

In Little Miss Sunshine, the vehicle of choice is a Volkswagon camper van. It's easy to see why this cracking little comedy went down a storm at this year's Sundance film festival. Not only is it a real ray of sunshine, it's also hilarious, straight from the heart and totally unmissable. Meet the dysfunctional Hoovers who, like The Griswalds of National Lampoon's Vacation fame, turn failure into an art form. Grandpa - an inspired turn by Alan Arkin - is a heroin-snorting womaniser. His son (Greg Kinnear) is that highly-valued commodity - an uninspiring motivational speaker.

Grandson Dwayne (Paul Dano) reads philiosopher Nietsche and has taken a vow of silence until he can qualify as a pilot. Dwayne's seven-year-old sister Olive (Abigail Breslin) is an overweight, plain girl who is obsessed with becoming a beauty queen. If that's not enough, Richard's wife Sheryl - superbly played by Aussie actress Toni Collette - is forced to look after her suicidal brother Frank (Steve "The Forty-Year-Old Virgin" Carrell), a gay literary genius who finds himself in meltdown. In short, they're a typical American car crash of a family of The Simpsons variety.

When young Olive makes it into the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in California, her family are poured into a rundown VW camper van before heading across country in order to fulfill her dreams of stardom. "I'm so glad, you're still here," whispers Sheryl, as she arrives to pick him up from hospital. "That makes one of us," he replies morosely. Now, at this point, you're probably thinking such a cast of oddballs is too much, too contrived. But, slowly, they win you over, with Kinnear and Collette doing much of the straight work, Alda providing the early laughs and everyone helped by a script that gets sillier as it goes along.

Indeed, by the time we're bundling dead bodies out of hospital windows we've descended into something close to farce. But it's still pretty good farce, with acting of the sort of uniformly high standard that will do the likes of Kinnear, Collette and particularly Carrell - the star of

The 40-Year-Old Virgin, of course - no harm at all. My only real quibble comes in the last 20 minutes, as the family finally arrive at the pageant.

All those little girls teetering around with big hair and false eyelashes that make them look like extremely short drag queens not only seems a soft target for comedy but also provides a powerful and uncomfortable reminder of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. Suddenly, the laughs dry up, the energy flags and an under-developed, unsatisfying ending takes rather too long to arrive. Still, definitely fun while it lasts.

I promise you the result is nothing like Robin Williams' latest family road trip movie catastrophe. Here the gags are subtle and the comedy comes in a much darker shade of black. The script is laugh-out loud funny and maintains an impressive balance between cute and downright black. It's a scream...

Trust me, I haven't laughed so much since Sideways left me in uncontrollable convulsions. It's side-splitting from start to finish.