SHERPA
Directed by Jennifer Peedom​
★★★★ 

STRANGERLAND
​Directed by Kim Farrant
★★★☆ 

VINCENT
Directed by Thomas Salvador
★★★ 

It has been a big five days for new Australian films at the Sydney Film Festival. And one of the highlights has been Michael Caton playing a dying taxi-driver in Last Cab To Darwin, a role to match Darryl "tell 'em they're dreamin" Kerrigan​ all these years after The Castle.

The 71-year-old brings all his charm and dry humour to a warm-hearted road movie about Rex, a Broken Hill cabbie who takes on a bold quest when he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. He decides to drive 3000 kilometres to Darwin to take advantage of new euthanasia laws that allow the terminally ill to die with dignity.

Director Jeremy Sims' adaptation of Reg Cribb's play, inspired by the journey of real life cabbie Max Bell almost two decades ago, could easily have been a harrowing story. Instead, it is a gem of a film about finding life in the face of death.

Before his diagnosis, Rex is widely-liked in Broken Hill as he collects fare and has what he calls an "on the sly" relationship with Polly (Ningali Lawford), a sharp-talking Aboriginal woman who lives across the road.

When he learns he has "three months – at best" to live, Rex heads to Darwin where Dr Nicole Farmer (Jacki Weaver) has been driving controversial new euthanasia laws, meeting, through various adventures and misadventures, livewire young Aboriginal man Tilly (Mark Coles Smith), and Julie (Emma Hamilton), a young English barmaid.

Last Cab is a vivid portrait of outback life that doesn't shy away from showing racism and violence. It succeeds through Caton's warmth and vulnerability as Rex discovers late in life what really matters.

Australian director Jennifer Peedom's Sherpa is an absorbing documentary about the Sherpas who guide climbers to Mount Everest. It takes place as an avalanche kills 16 Sherpas who are taking climbers' supplies to higher camps in 2014.

The tragedy re-ignites the tensions that resulted in a fight between a western climber and the Sherpas he insulted on the mountain the previous year. The younger Sherpas, who have become politicised through social media, resent being treated as virtual slaves by some climbers.

As it delves into their history and culture, Sherpa is made more immediate by the latest tragedy on the mountain, with an avalanche killing another 18 climbers and Sherpas in April.

Screening as a world premiere in the festival's competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" cinema, the documentary rewards the risks that Peedom and her crew took to make it.

Also screening in competition is the atmospheric Australian drama Strangerland, with Nicole Kidman as the sexually repressed mother of two troubled teenagers.

In the debut film for director Kim Farrant, she plays Catherine, who is unhappily married to stitched-up English pharmacist Matthew (Joseph Fiennes), in the fictional outback town Nathgari​.

They are parents to sexually precocious Lily (Maddison Brown) and younger brother Tommy (Nicholas Hamilton), who disappear one night – with the crisis testing their parents' relationship.

Rather than conventional storytelling, Farrant is more interested in the impact of the crisis on Christine and Matthew – the way trauma drives them to a primal state and brings out the repressed emotions that have undermined the marriage.

It's an enigmatic film that leaves audiences with uneasy questions and hints at a deeper theme about female desire and the connection between grief and sex.

Also in competition is Vincent,  a French superhero movie with a difference. A young loner who works on building sites, Vincent (actor-director-acrobat Thomas Salvador) appears to have a special affinity for water. Gradually we learn that not only can he swim like a speedboat but water temporarily gives him impossible strength.

When he saves a workmate from a beating one day, Vincent has to go on the run. It's an intriguing but slight take on the loneliness of difference.