Patrick Cavanaugh The Wolfman Cometh Sep 11, 2025 5/5

A grim, grisly, and gorgeous spin on the Western genre.

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Evan Dossey Midwest Film Journal May 19, 2025

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.

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Matt Brunson Film Frenzy Feb 5, 2025 3.5/4

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.

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Alistair Lawrence Common Sense Media Oct 11, 2023 4/5

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.

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J. R. Jones Chicago Reader Jul 14, 2022

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

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Richard Propes TheIndependentCritic.com Sep 20, 2020 3.5/4.0

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

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Yasser Medina Cinefilia Jul 24, 2020 6/10

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

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Leigh Paatsch Herald Sun (Australia) May 26, 2020 3.5/5

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

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David Lamble Bay Area Reporter May 7, 2020

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

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C.H. Newell Father Son Holy Gore May 3, 2019 5/5

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.

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Nick Rogers Midwest Film Journal Sep 17, 2010 4/4

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.

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Fernando F. Croce CinePassion Aug 30, 2009

Ferocious yet free of shallow misanthropy

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Rob Nelson City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Aug 21, 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.

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Cole Smithey ColeSmithey.com Apr 19, 2009 B+

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

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Jonathan Kiefer Sacramento News & Review Aug 7, 2008 4/5

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Jeffrey Overstreet JeffreyOverstreet.com (Ghost.io) Aug 22, 2007 A-

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.

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Matthew Turner ViewLondon Jun 19, 2007 4/5

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Brian Tallerico UGO Mar 24, 2007

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

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Chris Barsanti Film Journal International Mar 1, 2007

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

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Ted Murphy Murphy's Movie Reviews Jan 12, 2007 A-

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

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