There’s only a shred of hope in The Proposition, and it almost comes too late, in too small a quantity. But it doesn’t feel, to me, like an exercise in misery. There is more on its mind.

Full Review | May 19, 2025

The Proposition brings to mind Australia’s Outback flicks from the 1970s, mood pieces in which philosophical renegades seek to come to terms with their own restless souls while navigating merciless and uncompromising territories.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 5, 2025

The movie's sunburned and anarchic setting creates a memorable atmosphere that sticks to the screen as much as it does its leads' matted hair and filthy clothes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2023

Directed by John Hillcoat, this Aussie feature perfectly re-creates the charbroiled landscapes and cruel psychodrama of the old Sergio Leone westerns...

Full Review | Jul 14, 2022

May be one of the most realistic portrayals of how the West was really won.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 20, 2020

I know by heart the revisionism of this western. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jul 24, 2020

This self-styled "Australian western" is powerful, punishing drama of the highest class.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 26, 2020

As stark a meditation on British colonials marooned in a hellish land as any film since Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Full Review | May 7, 2020

A filthy, disturbing, and poignant Western about a whole host of themes from the Kantian philosophy of morality to the boundaries of love and family.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 3, 2019

John Hillcoat's violence-probing Western feels as uncompromisingly bleak, royally widescreen and graphically violent as any Sam Peckinpah opus - a sunburned, grimy-nailed saga of point-blank executions and blood wrung from a cat o' nine tails.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 17, 2010

Ferocious yet free of shallow misanthropy

Full Review | Aug 30, 2009

What the characters have in common--the only thing they have in common, really--is the desire for community amid the well-founded expectation of imminent, violent death.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2009

ustralian-born singer/songwriter Nick Cave pens his second film (after "Ghosts ... Of The Civil Dead") and generates a prescient allegory about imperialism.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Apr 19, 2009

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Guy Pearce seems to have boiled himself down into some kind of Guy Pearce Concentrate. Winstone looks like he's been sculpted from the Australian wilderness around him.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 22, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 19, 2007

Any movie that can cling to your memory with as much brutal power as this fantastic film is unquestionably a proposition worth taking.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2007

The finest, strangest and most uncompromising western to hit screens since Unforgiven.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2007

Cave's screenplay is masterful in taking the trappings of the western genre and transposing them to the Australian Outback. There's an ebb and flow to his writing and there's also the sense that tragedy is inevitable. He also manages to work in the dep

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 12, 2007

An Australian western without genre traditions in mind -- instead, their movie explores the complexities of moral relativity.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 30, 2006