Nick Cave directs a violent Australian Western movie that asks the age-old question whether blood is thicker than justice.

Top of the ‘family values’ film recommendations ought to be Nick Cave’s strikingly violent Australian desert Western, The Proposition. It’s all about putting your family first. The story of the film revolves around Captain Stanley’s (played by Ray Winstone) proposition to Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) of the notorious Burns brothers’ gang of rapacious Irish rebels. Having raided the Burns hideout in the film’s opening bloodbath, the Captain confronts Charlie: find your estranged elder brother, the sociopathic Arthur Burns, and kill him, or your younger brother, Mikey (a simpleton) will hang by Christmas.

...But the champions of ‘family values’ are (understandably) unlikely to take up my recommended viewing—the film concludes that neither family nor race nor nation come first. There are bigger issues than blood and caring for one’s own. There are deep, abiding things like seeking justice and peace, ending the cycle of retribution, and caring for the ‘stranger’ (cleverly in the movie, sometimes the aborigines, sometimes the convicts and sometimes the colonials).

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