This impressive first feature brought Almereyda immediate critical acclaim. Based on Mary Robison’s 1981 novel Oh!, the film is set in the bored and boozed-up world of a dysfunctional Kansas family. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Maureen Cleveland and her brother Howdy, together with their dad Eugene, the soda-pop and miniature-golf king, survive a tornado—although they manage to elude the transformative power of this natural disaster. Almereyda’s inventive visual style and the actors’ brilliantly wacky performances produce a wonderfully surreal atmosphere for this story of everyday craziness in the American heartland.