Ghosts of the Missing Dead

Egoyan seems to want it both ways: to show us the horror, and to show us how the world's denial of the horror has driven Saroyan and Raffi to making their case in the most extreme form possible, divorced from any recognizable human reality. As David tells his son in Ararat's denouement, describing the ferocity with which Raffi clung to his story at the airport, "He wanted so much to believe."

INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSASSIN ALSO FEEDS ON gaps in history, in this case that most iconic of unresolved American histories, the Kennedy assassination. Directing and writing his first feature after a career in commercials, Neil Burger has created a mock documentary, following unemployed reporter Ron Kobeleski (Dylan Haggerty) as he uncovers the fabled "second gunman," now living across the street from Kobeleski in a nondescript San Bernardino neighborhood. Burger at first toys with his unlikely premise, panning through the streets of this stuccoed suburbia as if meditating on the banality of evil, and indeed, our first few encounters with the assassin, Walter Ohlinger (Raymond J. Barry), bear this out: He's about as threatening as your Uncle Dan. In a later, surreally comical moment, Ohlinger is corralled by a tourist couple in Dealey Plaza into taking their picture as they look out onto the street where, moments before, he has described shooting Kennedy.

Burger's film is lighter, more flippant, more informed by pop culture than Egoyan's, but in the end, both films pull apart and examine the links between the political and the personal. Kobeleski's life is falling apart when he finds Ohlinger -- he needs to believe Ohlinger because he needs, at some level, to forge a human connection with this stranger.

From here, Burger's film veers into the realm of the political thriller, as Kobeleski follows Ohlinger to Dallas and Washington, D.C., searching for the final proof that will verify Ohlinger's story. As each lead proves a dead end, Kobeleski and Ohlinger begin to write their own versions of history, skirting the edge of madness and thus bringing them closer to the skewed, desperate vision of Ararat's filmmakers. In Dallas and Washington, as on the haunted plains of Anatolia, unresolved personal and political histories lead to a vivid rewriting of the present.

ARARAT | Written and directed by ATOM EGOYAN | Produced by EGOYAN and ROBERT LANTOS | Released by Miramax Films | At ArcLight, Laemmle's Music Hall, Mann Exchange

INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSASSIN | Written and directed by NEIL BURGER | Produced by BRIAN KOPPELMAN and DAVID LEVIEN | Released by Magnolia Pictures | At Laemmle's Fairfax, Laemmle's Playhouse 7