“Manchevski is a cubist of the silver screen.”
(The Globe and Mail)
“Manchevski has a rare visual intelligence, whether filming the face of a dying woman or Times Square’s reflection in a windshield.”
(Village Voice)
“Milcho Manchevski’s stylized western, Dust is a potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking... Mr. Manchevski suavely shuffles his various narratives, sometimes smoothly presenting the juxtaposed tales and on other occasions cutting violently from one story to another. The literal violence -- gun battles and punches detonating all over both stories and leaving a spray of intentional confusion -- is staged with bracing clarity... Mr. Manchevski demonstrates his gifts as a visual stylist and a filmmaker in command of the technical aspect of the medium. The constant onslaught of information -- sounds and pictures -- quiets down, and by the end everything makes sense, to the extent that it needs to. (He even uses howls of despair and pain as transitions.) The scenes that act as triggers to propel us into the dual stories work amazingly well... There’s enough culture clash that Dust doesn’t need the equivalent of a Zen koan.”
(Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times)
“This extraordinary TransContinental, TransCentennial epic plays like a cross between a savage Leone Spaghetti Western and an arthouse experiment in temporal narrative structure. […] The clever ending keeps you guessing right up to the last. By juggling past and present in what might be described as a cubist mosaic editing style, the whole grapples at some length with the meaning or futility of human existence begging questions long after viewing. Director Milcho Manchevski is a real original and Dust (a Feta Western?) unlike any other film you’ll see this year. Besides, where else can you see a frail old lady bloodily knock a young male burglar for sin?” (**** 4 stars out of 5)
(Jeremy Clark, What’s On in London)
“Dust is an anachronistic and iconoclastic cross-cultural “baklava Western” that explores what happens when West meets East in the violent history of the Balkans... In both
features, Manchevski uses diverse characters and a fragmented narrative structure to create a mosaic in which the details of history are subjective, contradictory, and illusory, and recollections are repeatedly altered to suit the desires of the storytellers or the narrative structures of the stories that they want to tell. In Dust, Manchevski carries this approach to abstract and surreal dimensions... The filmmaker also plays with the authority of documentary photography; in Dust, photos are records of a past which, as the stories unfold, we realize might never have happened. The photographs are only as true as the tales in which they reside... But perhaps Dust is most significantly a film about Manchevski’s love for the act of storytelling, which passionately endures despite violence and loss.”
(Roderick Coover, Film Quarterly)
“Passion, hatred, greed, cruelty, blood, destiny, repentance in the Balkans. Ambitious and fascinating, sometimes great, sometimes rhetorical, compelling but sometimes slow, violent but with touches of virtue, the film by Milcho Manchevski is a Balkan Western, a fine example of imperfection to love.”
(La Repubblica)
“The chaotic, brutal iconography of Italian Westerns is put to novel use in this timetraveling, self-referential, hugely ambitious story... The Macedonian sequences are
breathtaking, unfolding against a serene, desert landscape of blasted villages and bloody corpses. Manchevski has nothing less in mind than an investigation into the nature of storytelling, twisting and fracturing his narrative and using jarringly disjunctive images to pull the past and present into a Moebius strip of cruelty, retribution and hope of heaven.”
(Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide)
“A puzzle. After watching the film, the viewer needs to put together the pieces of the mosaic and to try to understand it. Not without effort. The present and the past constantly intertwine in one story which is rightly defined as Cubist. Like a Braque painting, actually.”
(L’eco di Bergamo)
“Features a brooding central performance from Joseph Fiennes, and is superbly eccentric on most levels. […] The conflation of Sam Peckinpah’s Wild West aesthetic with the chaos of Eastern Europe is often startling to watch.”
(The Independent Review)
“High-end surreal western”
(stopklatka.pl)