Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

As ever, Egoyan assembles a devoted repertory cast, including Christopher Plummer.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Sean Axmaker

Ararat is less about history than the necessity of dialogue and debate, and the devastating effects of stifling dialogue.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Expresses with uncommon power the highly relevant issue of public indifference to genocide, which is especially well dramatized by a scene with Elias Koteas as an actor playing a Turk.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

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.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

This toweringly ambitious picture confronts a brilliant director, Atom Egoyan, with a major historical event and a profound theme.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

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.

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

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.

Dallas Observer by Gregory Weinkauf

The resulting project matters much and should be seen, but how much it'll be FELT depends on your specific level of patience for a director who presumes audience comprehension to be at about a fourth-grade level (at least he's a shoo-in for Hollywood).

Film Threat by David Grove

Ararat isn't a great film because it's too convoluted and personal at times, but it's a showcase of technical mastery; the way Egoyan interweaves the stories of the historical recreation, the relationship between the son and his stepsister and the mystery of the art historian's dead husbands, is endlessly compelling.

TV Guide Magazine by Ken Fox

We only experience the horror of the genocide through several layers of artifice -- first Saroyan's, then Egoyan's own -- a sad acknowledgement that with each story told, we're drawn that much further from the truth.

USA Today by Mike Clark

Has its moments -- and almost as many subplots.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

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.

Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy

An impressive work in many regards -- the acting, the photography, the pace -- but it would've been even more so had Egoyan gone with his gut and been less indulgent of his brain.

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Egoyan is one of Canada's most ambitious and original filmmakers, but the power of this intricate drama falls short of its aspirations, despite his personal investment in the subject, since he is of Armenian ancestry himself.