LA Weekly
August 22, 2003
By Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

This ham-fisted 2001 drama by writer-director Milcho Manchevski stars magnetic David Wenham (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) and Joseph Fiennes as brothers Luke and Elijah, two turn-of-the-century gunslingers whose feud over a woman leads heartless Luke to life and redemption as a mercenary in Macedonia. Manchevski (whose debut feature, Before the Rain, was nom-inated for a 1994 foreign-film Oscar) has mapped out an ambitious picture, one that looks to draw parallels between his Macedonian homeland and the Wild West, and to paint a picture of a man who can find no foothold in the oncoming rush of modernity. Manchevski frames those ideas with a contemporary story of a hard-luck hood and a mysterious old woman who come together over Luke and Elijah's tale and an antique cache of gold. If it sounds excessive, that's because it is. In his attempts to bleed the two sagas together - one shot in golden sunlight, the other in dusk and black night - Manchevski stumbles headlong into a tangle of mismatched tones and plot points. Whatever ghost-story intrigue the film musters gives way to a tedious cycle of fighting, screwing, shouting and storytelling stuck together by two hours worth of hard-boiled dialogue gone gummy.

Village Voice
August 22, 2003
By Leslie Cumhi

A spaghetti Western transplanted to the hardscrabble plains of Macedonia, Dust is the second feature by Milcho Manchevski, whose Before the Rain showed Macedonia as a tinderbox of tensions. Here, he reaches back a century to find parallels in violence between East and West. In present-day Lower Manhattan, an elderly woman (Rosemary Murphy) compels a young burglar (Adrian Lester) to hear her story. One hundred years ago, two brothers, gunmen on the American frontier, fall for a French prostitute (Anne Brochet). The younger (Joseph Fiennes), weds her; the embittered elder (David Wenham), finds himself embroiled in the Macedonian revolution. After several plot twists, a remote village idyll, and too many shoot-outs, the brothers meet again - but by then, plausibility and our ear drums have been strained to their limits. Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square's reflection in a windshield. But in reaching for a cubist style of storytelling, he sacrifices character and motivation.

NY Post
August 22, 2003
By Megan Lehmann

MACEDONIAN writer- director Milcho Manchevski's stated purpose was to create a fractured narrative "like a Cubist tale," but the bloodthirsty Dust lurches so wildly and meaninglessly between genres and time frames that all it creates is motion sickness. The nonlinear narrative veers among the Wild West of 1900, the "Wild East" of Macedonia as the Ottoman Empire fell and present-day New York. Confused? You should be, because Manchevski (Before the Rain) is so obsessed with setting up excuses for his excessively violent gunfights that he's paid scant attention to linking the narrative strands. A connection between the past and present is revealed toward the end, but it's so weak it appears to be an afterthought rather than the movie's reason for being. Dust is nasty, too: Was it really necessary to show a toddler interrupting his breast-feeding to puff on a cigarette? The film opens as a burglar named Edge (Adrian Lester) breaks into the New York City apartment of an old woman, Angela (Rosemary Murphy), to steal her stash of ancient gold coins to pay off a pair of corrupt cops. After breaking his nose, Angela sits Edge down and forces him to listen to a story. Thus, we flash back to the tale of Luke (David Wenham) and Elijah (Joseph Fiennes), a biblical yarn with shades of Cain and Abel. The Wild West brothers have a falling out over a prostitute, Lilith (Anne Brochet): The Scripture-spouting Elijah marries her and a spurned Luke heads off to Macedonia, where he becomes a bounty hunter. There's much more melodrama involving the appearance in Macedonia of Luke's vengeful brother, the murder of the leader of the Macedonian Revolutionaries and the pregnant wife he leaves behind - as well as the events occurring in the parallel universe of the present day - but it all becomes a chore to decipher. Manchevski has created a good-looking film - the Macedonian landscapes are particularly striking - but it's totally without foundation.