Critic Reviews

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.

Though it features no battle scenes, The Notebook shines a powerful, unflinching light on the horrors of World War II.

It's a nightmare fairy tale that can be very difficult to watch.

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.

A bleak, despairing testament to the cruelty of war, and how it mangles and defaces everyone it touches.

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.

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.

The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers.

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.

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.