Last Cab to Darwin

2015, Australia, directed by Jeremy Sims

Thoroughly enjoyable road movie, with a very fine, and largely unsentimental, central performance from Michael Caton. There’s a good deal to savour in the depiction and deconstruction of various aspects of Aussie masculinity, which presumably comes from the original stage play, though the film version is in addition quite stunning from a visual perspective. The picture is also notable as a fairly benign depiction of the country’s vast interior, at least from the white perspective – there's little of the threatening aspect that is explored in other Aussie films dating back to the 1970s, while it provides glimpses of Aboriginal life that are quite rare in films not explicitly geared at such themes (it surely owes some debt to Backroads in that respect).