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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Egoyan treats the Armenian genocide and its aftermath as a metaphor for cruelty and denial -- an exercise in either pretension or timidity that exploits this tragedy.

Has its moments -- and almost as many subplots.

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.