Critic Reviews

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.