'The Sapphires' like the Antipodean 'The Commitments'

Based on Tony Briggs’s 2004 stage play, ‘The Sapphires’ is a crowd-pleasing, feel-good comedy about four sisters who discovered their voices while entertaining troops in Vietnam.

Director Wayne Blair applies a light touch to some potentially thorny subject matter – the enduring pain of a stolen generation of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their parents, the devastation of the war on the indigenous population – but like the sibling’s songbook, his film remains upbeat.