The Notebook
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: August 29, 2014 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
57
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 21 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
8
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniSep 26, 2014
A bleak, despairing testament to the cruelty of war, and how it mangles and defaces everyone it touches. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorSep 25, 2014
The challenge for a filmmaker attempting to adapt the Agota Kristof novella The Notebook is how much of its startlingly amoral world can actually be shown. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoSep 5, 2014
It's a nightmare fairy tale that can be very difficult to watch. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia PuigAug 28, 2014
Though it features no battle scenes, The Notebook shines a powerful, unflinching light on the horrors of World War II. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineClayton DillardAug 25, 2014
János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonAug 28, 2014
The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottAug 28, 2014
The Notebook is a skillfully made movie, with sequences that may haunt you after you leave the theater. But it lacks the power to turn its virtuosity, or the emotional discipline of its remarkable young leads, into a source of insight. Read full review
70
Village VoiceNick SchagerAug 26, 2014
Szász's harrowing film roots that coming-of-age process in suffering, depicting it with a grim solemnity that, by never wavering, ultimately leads to a tempered measure of unexpected hopefulness. Read full review
67
Portland OregonianMarc MohanSep 25, 2014
The movie is well-crafted and finely acted (including by the non-actors László and András Gyémánt as the creepy, affectless twins), but it never comes up with a new way to communicate its sadly familiar themes. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerAug 29, 2014
In the name of unblinking realism, Szász overdoes the allegory. There are no sacrificial gestures here, no heroism, no tears. He comes on as truth-teller, but he’s only telling half the truth. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 2, 2014
An elegantly made, almost unbearably depressing tale of WWII-era deprivation and survival. Read full review
63
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreSep 23, 2014
The Notebook makes for a grim but utterly fascinating parable. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottOct 10, 2014
There's something haunting going on in The Notebook -- in the story, in the performances, in the overall atmosphere -- that makes it hard to look away from, and equally hard to forget. Read full review
50
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanSep 25, 2014
This adaptation of Agota Kristof’s 1986 novel is impossible to take literally, yet too obscure to read between the lines. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijAug 28, 2014
The frequent voice-overs, in which the boys read what they wrote (heard over shots of them writing), add distance rather than insight because it is not the action of writing that's revealing but the events and thought processes that led them to write what they did. Read full review
50
VarietyAlissa SimonAug 28, 2014
Unfortunately, the glowering, non-pro Gyemant twins, who seem to have only one facial expression (and oddly anachronistic haircuts), continually break the spell woven by the other performers. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesMartin TsaiAug 28, 2014
This cautionary tale certainly has a chilling and timely message of how wars make monsters out of innocent people. But using reductive caricatures — complete with phlegmatic performances — to send that message is perhaps not the best way, because it turns something with modern-day implications into distant allegory. Read full review
50
The DissolveMike D'AngeloAug 28, 2014
Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubBenjamin MercerAug 27, 2014
Not a shred of human decency is on display in The Notebook, a handsomely made, hard-to-endure World War II parable set in an unnamed Hungarian backwater during the Nazi occupation of 1944. Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierAug 28, 2014
Despite the human drama here, we’re kept at a remove by stolid direction and by-the-numbers storytelling. Read full review
38
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireAug 29, 2014
A well-crafted but otherwise undistinguished and tedious entry in a long line of European films that make a grotesque show of war’s horrors, often viewed through the lens of childhood’s disabused innocence. Read full review
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