Daily Mail (UK)
May 3, 2002

Euro puddings don't come any more indigestible than Dust, an over-ambitious attempt by Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski to make a Sergio Leone-style Western in his native land, linked together by the implausible device of having an old woman (Rosemary Murphy) tell it as a story to a burglar (Adrian Lester) as he is attempting to rob her. The clean cut Lester is hideously miscast. The central characters in the Western, two warring brothers played by Joseph Fiennes and David Wenham, can't do American accents with any consistency, and their attempts to look tough and ruthless are pathetic. Numerous massacres are shot with maximum gruesomeness, to no dramatic effect whatsoever.

The Balkan landscape is a reminder that Manchevski, who made the critically acclaimed Before the Rain, has a visual talent, but he hasn't a clue how to handle actors, and his screenplay is a shambles.

I think the intention was to make a parable about a mans cupidity, along the lines of Erich von Stroheim's Greed or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but the film lacks coherent characters, relationships you can care about and an intelligible plot.