Ararat Critic Reviews

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.Read the full review

Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.Read the full review

This is a heartfelt piece, and while passion alone can't carry a movie, it sure helps. Ararat is uneven because Egoyan couldn't tell it smoothly.Read the full review

Egoyan's oblique, layered attack ultimately pays off, evoking a strong emotional connection between past and present, the historical and the personal, in a flowing, cinematic manner in collaboration with his frequent cameraman, Paul Sarossy. The film makes use of an intoxicating array of Armenian music.Read the full review

Has its moments -- and almost as many subplots.Read the full review

Perhaps this movie was so close to Egoyan's heart that he was never able to stand back and get a good perspective on it -- that he is as conflicted as his characters, and as confused in the face of shifting points of view.Read the full review

The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.Read the full review

Whatever the reason, the characters often seem only half-formed and there's a strange artificiality about the entire endeavor. Egoyan has never been a realist, and his style has contributed to his ability to deliver a knockout punch. Here, that punch is missing.Read the full review

Though typically engaging, Ararat occasionally suffers from what's previously been a virtue in Egoyan's filmmaking. His distancing techniques, rather than sharpening his ability to deal with a subject that lends itself to high emotion -- sometimes just seem distancing.Read the full review