This is London (The Evening Standard Online)
May 3, 2002
By Alexander Walker

Directed by Macedonia's Milcho Manchevsky, Dust is a mess. And a nasty mess, too. It begins in present-day New York, with burglarious Adrian Lester getting the worst of the argument with an old crone (Rosemary Murphy) he's robbing to pay off bent cops, and having to sit down and listen to her life story.

We suffer, too, as she tells it, starting with a flashback to the American West in the 1890s where Joseph Fiennes and David Wenham are good-bad boys who hunt each other for bounty, then forward a few years to the Macedonian struggle for independence against the Turks. Most distasteful is the continuous depiction of the Turks as barbarians hardly higher up the evolutionary scale than hyenas. This segment of a brutally overblown movie strikes me as almost actionably racist in tone and intention.

My revulsion watching it was redoubled by my shame as a minor shareholder in the company, Civilian Content, that controls the National Lottery franchise which invested £1,699,000 in it. I'm currently a loser on my shares. The public are even bigger losers - on the movie. With the aged squeezed for pensions, schools desperate for teachers and hospitals bereft of almost everything, aren't we generous financing obnoxious bits of Balkan history like Dust?