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Dust (2003)
Runtime: 2 hrs 7 mins
Synopsis: Feuding gunslinger brothers Elijah (Joseph Fiennes) and Luke (David Wenham) are the focus of Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski's DUST. The brothers have a Cain-and-Abel relationship that finally comes to a head when Bible-quoting Elijah marries a French prostitute with whom Luke... Feuding gunslinger brothers Elijah (Joseph Fiennes) and Luke (David Wenham) are the focus of Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski's DUST. The brothers have a Cain-and-Abel relationship that finally comes to a head when Bible-quoting Elijah marries a French prostitute with whom Luke has an affair. Luke tries to escape his brother, and his guilty conscience, by fleeing as a mercenary to Macedonia, where his personal quest for internal peace gets tangled up by the local struggle against the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. Manchevski tells the wild-west (by way of Macedonia) story of Elijah and Luke entirely in flashback, as elderly Lilith (Anne Brochet) recounts her family story to Edge (Adrian Lester), whom she has caught burglarizing her 21st-century New York City apartment. Cutting back and forth between the two time periods, Manchevski uses hallucinatory visuals and surreal images to both put the audience into the unraveling perspective of guilt-ridden Luke and approximate the fluctuating qualities of an old woman's memories. [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham, Anne Brochet, Adrian Lester, Eric Colvin
DVD Info
Release:
Nov 11, 2003
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Widescreen
Audio:
- Dolby Digital Stereo - English
Additional Release Material:
- Deleted Scenes
Text/Photo Galleries:
- Production Artwork
Reviews
The film lacks coherent characters, relationships you can care about and an intelligible plot.
There's something off-putting about the bloodthirsty relish with which violence is choreographed and photographed, whilst Fiennes is hopelessly miscast as the avenging preacher.
The two eras presented in this film may display similar violent dispositions but ultimately their overriding sensibilities are just too different to integrate.
It's a clumsy, pretentious, dull movie -- the kind that thinks it's way more important than it is.
The bloodthirsty Dust lurches so wildly and meaninglessly between genres and time frames that all it creates is motion sickness.
The chaotic, brutal iconography of Italian Westerns is put to novel use in this time-traveling, self-referential, hugely ambitious story.
Dust is a bust, a big bad movie of the scope, ambition and bravura that could be made only by a talented filmmaker run amok.
A picture this long and dense should work harder to be cogent and coherent.
Manchevski stumbles headlong into a tangle of mismatched tones and plot points.

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