Richard Crouse

This is Atom Egoyan’s most accomplished and daring work so far. The story of the 1915 Armenian holocaust is something that Mr. Egoyan feels passionately about, and that very fervour breaks through the iciness that has defined his other work. It is a complex, difficult movie that relies too heavily on exposition from the main characters to tell the story. Egoyan has turned the classic “show me, don’t tell me” rule of filmmaking on its head, making a wordy movie with too many tangential plots. It’s a confusing, but compelling work that works more often than it doesn’t, but threatens to collapse under the weight of its own earnestness.