Ask the Dust

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Ask the Dust is more than an amorous period piece. It's a strongly bitter, strongly sweet poem in prose and motion.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Ask The Dust may find Towne a little past his prime, but after so much time in the Hollywood wilderness, it's good to see him trying again.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Occasionally overrated as a writer but consistently underrated as a director, Towne does a marvelous job resurrecting all the seedy jumble of the long-gone Bunker Hill neighborhood.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

At a time when juvenile movies often dominate theaters, this is an adult movie through-and-through, and evidence that there are filmmakers who care about entertaining a more mature audience.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Its portrait of an artist hungry for experience is as timely today as when it was written.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Ask the Dust does manage to cast a spell. The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Ask the Dust requires an audience with a special love for film noir, with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Eccentric, miscast (though stimulatingly so), not for all tastes but far from flavorless.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

To Towne's credit, he's a thoughtful and conscientious romantic. He skillfully makes the two main characters a hot, volatile couple, deftly staging their courtship as if it were an erotic grudge match.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

What seduces most about Ask the Dust isn't its verisimilitude, but its gloriously old-fashioned backlot sheen - the L.A. of old Hollywood movies and of our collective fantasies.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

Thirty years of gestation have produced a film of great beauty with unfulfilled promise - a disappointment, but with much to recommend and be glad about.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The film, which is literary to a fault, includes an earthquake, but if the earth moves at all, thank Hayek, who gives the tale a smoldering life that finally lifts it from the page.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

The sepia-tinted palette of Ask the Dust drips, reeks and creaks of the seamy side of a city that takes more often than it gives.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

After an hour or so, Ask the Dust seems to have said everything, and the air starts to seep out of its hermetic atmosphere.

Empire Kim Newman

A curiously resistable drama, despite several strong elements - the most notable being newcomer Idina Menzel.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Something is missing, though. The themes are all there, but the movie doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier and rev you up.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

Farrell's performance possesses a touch too many mannerisms on loan from Tyrone Power and Clark Gable; you can almost hear the gears turning in his brain each time he cocks his head or raises an eyebrow in homage.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Highlighted by a strong and sensual performance from Salma Hayek as the doomed heroine, elegant pic's muted quality and the central character's vexingly contrary behavior will keep auds from connecting with characters who themselves have trouble establishing bonds.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Miscast, constricted, loose in tone and meandering in intent, it has far fewer moments of inspiration than unintended laughter.

Premiere John Migliore

Farrell and Hayek are two beautiful people with absolutely no chemistry. Even when they're lying in bed together, they're so far apart that they might as well be in different movies.

Miami Herald Peter Debruge

It would seem Towne is too much in love with the book to recognize its fundamental limitations as a film.

Time Richard Corliss

Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Ask the Dust is beautifully shot -- sepia becomes the ravishing, affecting Ms. Hayek. Unfortunately the images of the heaving waves of the Pacific in the moonlight, of mountains rising over scrub and cactus in the sunlight here, serve only to emphasize the emptiness of the drama unfolding in the foreground.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Though the film offers a meticulously rendered Depression-era L.A., it's not in the same league as "Chinatown," for which Towne wrote an Oscar-winning script. Here, the characters seem shallow, their motivations murky.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Watching it is like being in a restaurant where the waiter brings out a luscious platter of food, then keeps walking right past you. All night long.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Farrell is badly miscast as an ethnic Italian with an inferiority complex, the star-crossed love story has very little emotional pull, and even the (heavily CGI-enhanced) period atmosphere ultimately seems rather forced and self-conscious.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

One of the most eagerly awaited cinematic projects of 2006, which may be why it lands with such a curious thud.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

The film is a particular disappointment considering its pedigree.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The movie lacks even the misplaced fervor of obsession. It's lifeless kitsch.