The Sapphires

In the Australian outback of the 1960s, four singing Aborigines (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Miranda Tapsell, Shari Sebbens) form a girl group to tour Vietnam entertaining the troops, with a down-on-his-luck musician (Chris O'Dowd) as their manager. Directed by Wayne Blair and written by Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson (loosely based on the experiences of Briggs' mother and her sister and cousins), here's another one of those lovely, unexpected surprises that sail north out of Australia every now and then. The movie tends to slide into clichés whenever the music stops, but fortunately, the music never stops for long, and it's just about irresistible. Meanwhile, the clichés are rendered painless by excellent performances from the five principles, with O'Dowd and Mailman particularly standing out.