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Hungary, Germany, Austria · 2013
Rated R · 1h 52m
Director János Szász
Starring András Gyémánt, László Gyémánt, Molnár Piroska, Ulrich Thomsen
Genre Drama, War
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During the final stretch of World War II, two young boys are sent to live with their abusive grandmother in a small Hungarian village. As a means of survival, the brothers study the atrocities around them, teaching themselves how to manipulate and hurt others to protect themselves from the horrors of war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wall Street Journal by John Anderson
The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers.
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.
Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling.
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.
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