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Redundant and unnecessary.

Overrated

Boring

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

In spite of a lukewarm critical response, the fact that Ararat won Best Motion Picture at the Genie Awards and that it would be a definite personal film to Atom Egoyan sounds promising. He viewed his better films The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Remember (2015) as having allusions to the Armenian Genocide, which impacted his family; Ararat is meant to deal with the often neglected subject head-on, or so you'd think. Rather, it deals with a crew in Toronto that makes a film about the genocide. Seeing snippets of their work, I wish Egoyan had made some version of that instead.I rarely use this criticism of film, but Ararat is excessively preachy, much of it coming from David Alpay and Bruce Greenwood, who spout out facts at length, often without a lot of emotion, and often to people who wouldn't be much interested. A lot of this is entirely irrelevant a customs official like Plummer's character, no matter how the film attempts to spin this. When Alpay's character quotes Hitler about no one remembering the Armenians, Elias Koteas' character, who'd earlier questioned if the account went exactly as it is said to, and who notes this matter is behind him and his colleagues born in Canada, echoes the Nazi dictator's sentiment in a deeply sinister voice. He has gone from mild skepticism to all-out Hitler, in Egoyan's shameless breach of Godwin's law.Much of this smacks as false. When Greenwood's character, an actor, is advised to read a book that inspired the film, the character replies he has read the book, along with every single thing ever written about the artist it's about, the Armenian Genocide, and the Armenian people in general, and the character isn't even said to be Armenian. Is this the kind of in-depth expertise Egoyan finds in his actors on a regular basis? Do actors who've read every book ever written about the broadest of subjects frequently line up at his auditions, and he gets his pick? I'm sure every other director envies him.Films about films are too common. Occasionally, you get a really great one that makes it okay, such as Sunset Blvd. Most of the time, it's just narcissistic, and in this case, it definitely gets in the way of the awareness Egoyan was hoping to create.

I came across the movie Ararat while doing research for a paper I was writing for school. I watched it hoping that it would give me further insight into the Armenian Genocide. I can honestly say that this movie not only enforced the research I had done, but also led me to new topics I had not yet researched myself. I strongly believe in knowing about the events in a movie before watching it. Otherwise, you can sit through an entire film and not understand the meaning or significance that it holds. For instance, if you watch a film on Gallipolli (a very important battle for the Australians in the First World War) you may not know what it means for the people who were involved (like most people who live outside of Australia). However, if you take time to do a little research before hand you can easily watch a film about it and understand its importance. That said, I believe that this applies to Ararat in the same way. If you don't take the time to research the Armenian Genocide along with other aspects of the film such as the Van Resistance, Arshile Gorky, Clarence Ussher or even Aghtamar Island, you can never fully understand this movie (or any other film about the Armenian Genocide as well). I thought this movie was the perfect mix of storyline and documentation. In my opinion, it presented the facts of the Armenian Genocide accurately and effectively, without turning into a documentary about it. It showed how it still affects the Armenians of today, even though it happened a little bit less than one hundred years ago. How there could still be such denial and hatred between the people who were involved. The fact that we know so much about the holocaust that Adolf Hitler carried out and so little about this Holocaust, that started only 18 years before Hitler came to power, is shocking and deeply upsetting. I recommend this film highly, as not only an important piece on this historical event, but also an excellent film. I must applaud Atom Egoyan for doing this event justice and bringing it to life on the screen.

What a mind-numbing piece of pure propaganda. I simply cannot believe most users gave good reviews for this movie. Not only is this movie simply a bad movie that is extremely difficult to sit through, it's also one that goes to such great lengths to prove its "message" that the fabrications become utterly hilarious.The director is trying to associate the genocide that took place in Germany with what he proposes was happening in the Ottoman Empire. This desperate attempt is so apparent at some points in the movie that it becomes outrageous. There is a suggestion that the Turks decided to kill all Armenians with a "planned and systematic" decision (a direct quote out of U.N's definition of genocide, mind you!). By the way, these Armenians are the same people with whom the Turks had been living side by side as neighbors, friends, commercial partners.. etc. peacefully in the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years. What is completely laughable about this whole situation is the reason given for this so-called genocide: The claim that Armenians got a hold of finances in the Ottoman Empire and were controlling money markets! This bold lie (which lacks the backing of any kind of historical evidence) shows how desperate the director's attempt is at drawing parallels between the Jews in Germany and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.The characters in the movie lack depth and sophistication. The Turks in the movie are either gay men who are unsure about their identity, drug dealers, rapists or tyrant Pashas. The extreme bias in the movie is so apparent and even the plot weakens and slows down so much at some points that watching some of the scenes is like a torture.The movie depicts Turks as "possessing the latest technological weaponry", armed against the "poor, innocent, helpless" Armenians. What an outrageous lie. The Turks at that point in the World War I were an extremely poor nation, being attacked at all fronts by imperialist powers such as Britain, France, Italy and Russia, who wanted to get a piece of the "cake" that was the Ottoman Empire. In their desperate attempt at survival, a lot of Turkish soldiers could not even get hold of bayonets, let alone rifles, and did not even have proper clothing for fighting! This was a violent war, and both Turks and Armenians were killed. Why doesn't the movie talk about what the Armenian terrorists and guerrilla did to the Turkish villages? Where are the Armenian bandits who raped and killed Turkish women? This is such a one-sided story that it even justifies an abominable terrorist act such as killing an innocent Turkish diplomat. At one point, one of the main characters implies that such "hatred" towards the Turks, and what they supposedly did, justifies and legitimates the assassinations of lots and lots of Turkish diplomats by Armenian terrorists in the 70s and 80s. The terrorists who committed these acts, according to the movie, are so-called freedom fighters.I think it's so ironic that Charles Aznavour at some point wonders: "I can't believe how someone could hate us so much, and this hatred still continues". The imagined hatred he talks about does not exist. What exists, though, is the Armenian hatred that shows throughout the whole movie: this movie is filled with pure hatred towards the Turks, and it's not a subtle hatred either.It makes me sick to the stomach when the imperialist Western powers can so easily blame the Turks for having committed a genocide when their own hands are full of blood from the massacres they've committed both in the heart of Europe, the Americas and also in their colonies. It is extremely hypocritical of them to even talk about "genocide" when they failed to act upon a genocide that was happening before their very eyes in the 90's: the Bosnian genocide. This movie shows how easy it is to manipulate truths and focus on hatred using cinema as a tool.

I am not in any way Armenian or Turkish, nor do I have any relations with Armenians or Turks. However, I believe that this was an excellent movie and do not see the need for anger or offense to a movie. Yes, there may not be historical or political support or reference, and substantial evidence is not provided for every claim to truth in the movie. That becomes irrelevant though, once you consider that this movie may be based from an emotional standpoint and political and historical propaganda was not the purpose. It must also be taken into consideration that it is, in the end, a MOVIE, which is a form of media notorious for distorting facts and presenting biased opinions.