"Less the imitation of life than its distillation...Dust in the Wind opens in a mining village in the mountainous interior and concerns the dislocation that's one of Hou's major themes. (His films are mainly about young people and their families, actual and surrogate.) Following a pattern common to their village, two students, a boy and a girl, quit high school and move to Taipei. She unhappily finds a job as a seamstress; he works for a printer, then quits and becomes a delivery boy. In the evening they hang around a friend's studio or have drinking parties to send off other friends as they're drafted into the army.... Like his friends, the hero is drafted and stationed on Quemoy (where the major activity seems to be interrogating terrified fishermen who have drifted over from the mainland). When his brother writes to tell him the girl married someone else, the film suddenly comes together as an affecting saga of impossible escape, of biding time, of the iron rule of history, and of unhappy love." J. Hoberman, Village Voice