Sunday Times (UK)
May 5, 2002
Milcho Manchevski's film wants to be a good yarn in its own right, but also a testament to the value and allure of storytelling. We thus get two narratives for the price of one: the fantastical tale of two cowboys (David Wenham and Joseph Fiennes) who end up in Macedonia; and, framing this, the story of how a present-day New Yorker (Rosemary Murphy) comes to be telling the cowboy story to a luckless burglar (Adrian Lester). A link between the two strands is eventually revealed, but it's not strong enough to bind the film into a cohesive, involving whole. One star.
Peter Bradshaw
Friday May 3, 2002
The Guardian
This very tiresome, overblown piece of machismo from director Milcho Manchevski made a terrible beginning to last year's Venice film festival, and looks no better now. Ostensibly about two American cowboy-mercenaries at the turn of the century, who arrive in the wild east of the war-torn Ottoman empire, this is a laboured attempt to imbue Macedonian nationalism with a bit of Butch-and-Sundance glamour. Their story is told in flashback by an old lady in Manhattan holding a burglar at gunpoint - and by the end, you'll feel you're being held at gunpoint too. All three male principals are supposed to be American, yet they're played by two Brits and an Australian: Adrian Lester, Joseph Fiennes and David Wenham, and the feeling of ersatz is overpowering in this British-German-Italian-Macedonian co-production. Wenham in particular sounds like a cross between Walter Brennan and Benny Hill.
Philip French
Sunday May 5, 2002
The Observer
A magical realist piece much indebted to the spaghetti western, Milcho Manchevski's Dust centres on two brothers, both gunslingers from the Wild West, continuing their rivalry in the director's native Macedonia where they are caught in the bloody crossfire between Turks and local guerrillas in 1903. The convoluted narrative style, borrowed perhaps from Titanic, has a romantic elderly lady in a New York hospital narrating the story to a thief who's after her hidden wealth. It's muddled, but conceived on a grander scale than British productions nowadays.
