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The Western may have died in the 1970s, but we’ve continued to see a slow trickle of great Westerns in the last few decades<\/a>. Case in point: “The Proposition,” an Australian oater that not only impressed most critics, but ended up haunting the late great Roger Ebert<\/a>, who evidently thought the film played like “a Western moved from Colorado to Hell.”<\/p>\n Like Russell Crowe and Nicholas Hoult’s criminally underseen Western<\/a> “True History of the Kelly Gang,” “The Proposition” is set in Australia rather than the traditional Old West, and stars Guy Pearce as 1880s bushranger Charlie Burns. After losing a fight with the police, the criminal is presented with the titular choice by Ray Winstone’s lawman Captain Morris Stanley. What exactly is the choice? Well, it ain’t a very good one. To save his younger brother, Mikey (Richard Wilson), from being put to death, Charlie must find and kill his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), who is a wanted man. Making matters worse, Charlie has to leave Mikey behind to hunt down his older sibling in one of the Outback’s harshest, most unforgiving regions.<\/p>\n The movie was directed by John Hillcoat and penned by none other than Nick Cave,\u00a0who previously co-wrote the script for 1988’s “Ghosts… of the Civil Dead.” Much like\u00a0the elegiac, mournful “Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,”<\/a> to which Cave contributed a soundtrack, “The Proposition” is very much in the revisionist Western vein, portraying life in the Australian Outback of the 1880s as a savage and unforgiving land populated not by heroes and villains but by complex, selfish, and downright evil individuals \u2014 and it’s great. At least, Roger Ebert thought so.<\/p>\n