Little Miss Sunshine is an apt title for such a rapturous ray of sunlit glee. The title card plays over a morose-looking Steve Carell, his face a picture of misery. The juxtaposition of optimistic words over his pessimistic outlook is filmmaker’s Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ little clue that the light in their story is discovered in the intricacies of human dysfunction and alienation. It is possible to have a wholly satisfying tale of hopefulness and happy-endings without any semblance of saccharine sentimentality. Little Miss Sunshine is proof positive that in the realities of life’s little challenges, failure is not a cause for misery but a step on the road to living.

The Greatest Comedy Tournament is entering its final stages over at AnomalousMaterial.com, if you have yet voted, head on over there for a look. Meanwhile, while you’re here – if you haven’t cast your vote in the Godfather 1 versus Godfather 2 debate you can do so right here! We’ve been busy posting many top 10 lists over the last few weeks, the most popular (and controversial) of which is Rodney Twelftree’s Top 10 Sequels of all time. We followed that up with the less controversial Part 3s that are better than Part 2s top 10. Rodney has also written an excellent top 10 list looking at the best Australian comedy films.

Those kids of the TV generation, bred on the old sci-fi serials that inspired Lucas to write Star Wars, really came to the fore in the 1980s thanks to the successes seen by Lucas and Spielberg in the late 1970s. The two Godfather’s of the blockbuster continued to be at the forefront of family-orientated science-fiction with “Empire Strikes Back” and “E.T.”, while those inspired by their method like Zemeckis, Dante, and Robbins took us on more adventurous journeys into the fantastical. For the fantasy and science-fiction genres, there are few periods in film history better than the 1980s. Children, with their love of adventure and fairytale, had never had it so good.

Ruth at Flixchatter and Aiden at Cut The Crap Movie Reviews have been on the happy pills and seen fit to give the Happy 101 Award to Top10Films. This award thingy is all about what makes us happy. Ten things that make us happy to be more precise.

Aliens is one of my favourite films. It arrived at a time – during the middle 1980s – when science-fiction was a huge box office attraction. Lucas had kicked it all off with “Star Wars”, with Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” continuing the trend. “Aliens” was the perfect follow-up to “Alien” – bigger, more expansive, and equally as scary, it also benefitted from a fast-moving action-movie aesthetic that wryly mocked the war credentials of America’s military in Vietnam. Here was a crowd-pleaser and blockbusting spectacle that had depth, character, and intelligence.

Angie and Chantale over at CinemaObsessed.com were kind enough to invite me to write a guest post for the site. I decided to wax lyrical about my love of the films I saw growing up – notably those late 80s movies that started appearing on UK television in the early 1990s. You can see my little article right here!

“The Amityville Horror” was a film born out of public fascination. That fascination was fuelled by post-Exorcist hysteria, that demanded haunted house flicks anchored by American history and the collapse of the American dream., with all the trappings of religious folklore and the dark side of the Catholic church. No longer would garlic and silver bullets keep the demons away. Now the evil was one’s home itself, and audience’s were loving it.

The Radio Times here in the UK held a reader poll to discover the best family film of all time with over 2500 people voting Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” number 1. It’s a curious list with only a couple of films (“E.T.” and Robert Zemeckis’ “Back To The Future”) lacking at least one musical interlude. Given the readership of the magazine I’m guessing the 2500 people who voted consisted mainly of grandparents wishing to occupy their children’s children with a melancholic sing-a-along hence the inclusion of films “Sound of Music” and “Mary Poppins” amongst others. Read on to see the top 10 and don’t forget to click here to be in with a chance of winning ten family film DVDs.