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With Robin William's RV reeking like week-old road kill, the Sundance success story Little Miss Sunshine is a welcome antidote to the shallow schmaltz of that much-maligned sub-genre, the family road-trip comedy. A model of dysfunction, the Hoovers ride roughshod over traditional American values as they leave the burden of false-expectations by the roadside.

"Pro-honesty" Sheryl (Collette) is a mother who'll buy a bucket of fried chicken for dinner but make salad to go with it and husband Richard's (Kinnear) 9-point self-help programme isn't even able to help itself. Grandpa's (Arkin) been kicked out of his retirement home for snorting heroin and Uncle Frank (Carell), the US's second most eminent Proust scholar, is on suicide watch after being ditched by his hunky grad-student boyfriend.

Afflicted like all kids by their freak-show family are Dwayne (Dano) and Olive (Breslin). Though the adults are all on top form, it's the youngest members of the cast who really shine - not least because their characters are allowed room to develop and grow. Dolorous teen Dwayne has spent nine months in silence "because of Nietzsche". Meanwhile his sister Olive is alive with excitable optimism. Slightly chubby and dressed as ridiculously as any seven year-old given the freedom to dress herself, it's Olive's fluked opportunity to compete in a child beauty contest that sends the Hoovers on their cross-country trip in the seventh member of the family, a run-down Volkswagen bus imbued with a charming celluloid personality unique to old VWs.

Their first feature-length production having built a career together on music videos, husband and wife team Dayton and Faris never fail to impress behind the camera. Resisting the gratuitous wide-angle shots that form the tourist board vision of America's mid-west, the duo instead chose to mirror the film's central message. Crumbling highway embankments, weathered boardwalks and fields of creaking oil pumps express the reality behind the continent's glamorous fa�ade. As the Hoovers amiably demonstrate, the American dream is an unattainable myth and what lies beneath is where the real beauty is found.

Moving, hilarious and satirical without being saccharine, obvious or heavy-handed, Little Miss Sunshine is a ray of light at the end of a gloomy summer season for film comedy. And just wait for the riotous finale, it's worth the price of admission all by itself.

Out on DVD 22nd January 2007.