| Cast |
Colin Farrell, Salma Hayek, Donald Sutherland, Eileen Atkins, Idina Menzel, Justin Kirk |
| Director |
Robert Towne |
| Screenplay | Robert Towne, from the novel by John Fante |
| Music | Ramin Djawadi, Heitor Pereira |
| Cinematography | Caleb Deschanel |
| Editing | Robert K. Lambert |
| Sound formats | Dolby Digital, DTS |
| Made in | 2006 |
| Produced by | Paramount Pictures, Cruise/Wagner Productions, Ascendant Pictures, Capitol Films, Moonlighting Films, Noble House Entertainment Pictures, VIP 3 Medienfonds |
Official Site | IMDB page | ScreenIt Report
Trailer: Small | Medium | Large
| Genre | Romantic, drama |
| Language | Some |
| Nudity | Some |
| Sex | Mild |
| Violence | Brief |
| Prejudice | None |
| Blasphemy | None |
| Drug abuse | None |
| Comments | An adult love story, nothing gratuitous with poignant themes. |
| These details are supplied by the FPB. If you have a problem with any of the above, please take it up directly with the FPB. Read the Classification Guidelines. | |
Sex / Nudity |
Violence |
Blood / Gore / Gross |
Guns / Weapons |
Profanity |
Alcohol / Drugs |
| Smoking |
Disrespectful / Bad Attitude |
Imitative Behaviour |
| Frightening / Tense Scenes |
Jump Scenes |
Tense Family Scenes |
| Music (Scary/Tense) |
Music (Inappropriate) |
Topics to talk about |
| Scale (Max) | 20 |  |
What the Critics say | ||
| Cape Argus / The Star Diane de Beer  Will likely only gather dust. | 1 |  |
| Cape Times Kevin Crust Touch of doomed romanticism. | 10 |  |
| iAfrica.com Melanie Daly 'Ask The Dust' is a cure for insomnia, nothing else. | 5 | |
| Mail & Guardian Shaun de Waal | 12 |  |
| The Citizen Sabrina Dean Fails to rise above being a somewhat inconsistent romance lacking in purpose. | 11 | |
| Sunday Times Barry Ronge The cast and director work hard but the film remains inert. | 10 | |
| 24.com Alistair Fairweather It's got passion, ambition, intelligence and even Salma Hayek naked, but Ask the Dust just doesn't work. | 5 | |
| BBC Stella Papamichael Like the desert beyond, the film is arid and airless. | 5 | |
| Box Office Annlee Ellingson 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. | 5 | |
| Chicago Sunday 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, and with an understanding that any woman he meets will be beautiful. | 15 |  |
| eye WeeklyThe casting of Colin Farrell in Ask the Dust as a sexually inexperienced Italian-American intellectual is inspired in the same way that hiring Tom Cruise to not get laid in Eyes Wide Shut was: he's playing so far against type as to appear alien. | 1 | |
| 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. | 15 | |
| 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. | 13 | |
| ScreenItAnd by the time the predictable and supposed tear jerker bit finally comes along at the end, you likely won't be emotionally connected or otherwise engaged enough to think about much beyond wondering how this could have been made by the same guy who wrote Chinatown. | 8 | |
| Metacritic.com 33 critics | 12 | |
| Rottentomatoes critics 99 critics | 10 | |
| Rottentomatoes tomatometer Tomatometer 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. | 7 | |
What the People say | ||
| Internet 1852 Netizens A film that is more than Farrell's buttocks, but not quite the great classic it aspires to be. | 12 | |
Average .. 44% | 9 | |