To the list of sentences that have probably never been uttered in prior human history, you can add “There’s a duck in the bidet!” which appears in the Spanish comedy Only Human (Seres Queridos). It arrives onscreen this weekend after a delay of a few weeks from its originally scheduled opening, just in time for the more fervid among you to note rather a lot of similarities to Little Miss Sunshine: Both are tales of dysfunctional families featuring a lost-in-fantasy young girl, a more seriously obsessed teen brother and a grandfather who urges his grandson to sow more wild oats. Oddest of all, both films were directed by a husband and wife team, a rare category indeed. (I can’t think of any others.)

The finale of Little Miss Sunshine made me laugh so hard that it brought tears to my eyes, which was not the case with the rest of the film. I thought at the time that if ever a movie was redeemed by its ending, this was it. In retrospect I don’t think that’s the case: This is a too-often sloppy movie that slacks off just because it knows it has a killer ending in store. It also counts on a terrific cast to take up far too much of that slack.

Japanese horror films, known as J-horror, have almost singlehandedly rescued genre fans from a quagmire of American remakes and sequels. They tend to feature pasty-faced ghosts (usually children with pitch-black eyes and solemn expressions) and an unbearable fatalism. They’re doubly unsettling for US audiences because their foreign setting makes it difficult to tell if their ambiguity stems from the supernatural or merely an alien culture. Hollywood, smelling a trend, is recycling them with blonde actresses like Naomi Watts and Sarah Michelle Gellar—heaven forbid discerning moviegoers should endure the subtitled originals. With Ringu and Ju-On already remade as The Ring and The Grudge, it was inevitable that some progressive studio would also regurgitate Kairo, which has garnered a following here.