USA Today by Claudia Puig

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

Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard

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.

San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego

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

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Tirdad Derakhshani

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

Wall Street Journal by John Anderson

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

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

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.

Village Voice by Nick Schager

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.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

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.

Portland Oregonian by Marc Mohan

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.

The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij

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.

Los Angeles Times by Martin Tsai

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.

The Dissolve by Mike D'Angelo

Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling.

The A.V. Club by Benjamin Mercer

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.

New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier

Despite the human drama here, we’re kept at a remove by stolid direction and by-the-numbers storytelling.