Barbarosa

Testifying to the timelessness of the Western genre through both its ballad form and its circular narrative about the functions of legend, this is also blessed with perfect casting: Nelson and Busey as the grizzled border-country gringo and the raw German-American farmboy, both outcasts in a vast, spartan, Texan terrain - the one a resigned wanderer whose invincibility sustains a 30-year old blood feud with the family that fears his name, the other accidentally apprenticed to this mythical menace. Transplanted Australian director Schepisi confidently threads his own route through Peckinpah territory (a Mexican patriarch demanding honour; a graveyard resurrection), less concerned with Peckinpah's gothic haunting than with teasing dark, absurd ironies from the symbiosis of sworn enemies.