Dust Details

Macedonian film-maker Milcho Manchevski has lofty ambitions for this brutal, depressing film, that alternates between a contemporary New York drama and an early-20th-century “Wild East” blood bath. This is an awkward combination, despite some inventive storytelling touches, and it's not aided by an unappealing quartet of protagonists. Its starting point is the attempted robbery of an apartment by a petty thief (Adrian Lester), who is wounded by ailing owner Rosemary Murphy. For some reason, she decides to recall the origins of her ancestors, namely two brothers (a pair of shaky performances from David Wenham and Joseph Fiennes) who fall out over a woman and end up as fierce adversaries in the wilds of Macedonia. Manchevski playfully tinkers with the nature of narration — questions raised by Lester over minor details have an immediate impact on past events seen in flashback — but there is little else in this tangled, bloody mess to engage or excite the viewer.

This very wild eastern Western bears an uncanny resemblance to that supposedly extinguished early-'90s entity, the... read more on Time Out