Like the desert beyond, the film is arid and airless.
Comment
05/23/06
Ask the Dust (2005)
37
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:101
Fresh:37
Rotten:64
Average Rating:5.1/10
Consensus: Though Hayek is luminous, Farrell seems miscast, and the film fails to capture the gritty, lively edginess of the book upon which it's based.
Runtime: 1 hr 56 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: From the director of CHINATOWN comes a tale of small-town dreams and big-city challenges. Colin Farrell plays a down-and-out writer in 1930s L.A. who dreams of making it big, and Salma Hayek plays... [More]
Starring: Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins
Director: Robert Towne
Reviews for Ask the Dust
Top CriticA curiously resistable drama, despite several strong elements -- the most notable being newcomer Idina Menzel.
06/02/06
Top CriticIt is a odd-sounding, odd-looking piece of work, not uninteresting by any means, but there is something a little forced in both lead performances.
06/03/06
Top CriticThis film is too dull to really spring to life.
05/06/06
Although Chinatown writer Towne lovingly depicts the Depression-era LA setting (actually shot in South Africa), the film misfires.
06/24/06
Top CriticDonald Sutherland saunters onscreen, momentarily raising the level of the film, before he ambles back out the door and things sink back down to the listless and pointless pace that typifies this jumbled mess of a movie.
04/19/07
What's surprising about the new film's vapid emptiness is that Towne also wrote the screenplay. And the writing is the film's central problem.
03/16/06
Towne and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel beautifully capture Fante's city of the dispossessed, where the seasons never change.
03/16/06
Towne draws out the era's rampant poverty and ethnic divisions through a story that plays to his strengths as a writer and a romantic
03/08/06
Towne has a perhaps unique ability to make this ill-fated movie romance classically seductive while doing full justice to its authentic subject. [His] canniness as a writer and casual sophistication do wonders for the actors.
11/01/06
... after an hour or so, Ask the Dust seems to have said everything, and the air starts to seep out of its hermetic atmosphere.
03/18/06
Click to read the article
04/23/09
So hazy and uncertain, it's more musty curio than must-see ... Farrell couldn't play introspective if he were doing the role on a psychiatrist's couch.
03/23/06
Despite acute period detail and gorgeous desert cinematography by Caleb Deschanel from a South African locale, real life doesn't always shape up into a tightly structured script.
03/10/06
[A] sexy, sensual, romantic, nostalgic adaptation of the novel ...
03/18/06
Ask the Dust requires an audience with a special love for film noir, with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer, and with an understanding that any woman he meets will be beautiful.
03/18/06
Top Critic... not for all tastes but far from flavorless.
03/18/06
The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.
03/10/06
Termina numa nota amarga; não em função de sua história, mas da promessa não realizada de se revelar um filme grandioso, digno de seu diretor.
06/08/06
Airless, joyless
08/30/09
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