Notebook, The

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it's a love story that swings confidently between age and youth, and, like the young Tiger Woods of old, avoids every trap along the way.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The director is Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, and perhaps his instinctive feeling for his mother helped him find the way past soap opera in the direction of truth.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

If you're the sort who enjoys shedding such in darkened theaters, your must-see summer movie has arrived.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

May be corny, but it's also absorbing, sweet and powerfully acted. It's a film about falling in love and looking back on it, and it avoids many of the genre's syrupy dangers.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

The Notebook is well worth the risk of diabetic shock for the sake of superb acting that transcends its teary milieu.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

An old-fashioned and occasionally schmaltzy movie that delivers an emotional wallop

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Audiences craving big, gooey over-the-top romance have their must-see summer movie in The Notebook.

Film Threat Peter Lowry

Overall, The Notebook is a surprisingly good film that manages to succeed where many other "chick flick" like romances fail.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40 years ago to their roles in "Splendor in the Grass."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Doesn't completely work on its own terms, mainly because its romantic casting just doesn't spark: It doesn't make us fall in love with its lovers.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

What a glorious weepie The Notebook might have been if they’d just found a way to get rid of the damned notebook.

USA Today Claudia Puig

A gifted cast was bogged down by a treacly tale.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Dramatically speaking, the movie version of The Notebook has a first act and a last act but lacks a transition. If it were a sandwich, it would be two slices of bread without filling.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

We get pleasure watching two sets of likeable, convincing actors move toward their foreordained futures. The film's affecting ending proves familiarity needn't breed contempt, after all.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Sadly, the elements that made the book special did not survive the transition to the screen.

Variety Robert Koehler

A determined and often affecting romance that doesn't speak down to audiences.

Village Voice Jessica Winter

Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script, Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

May be one hundred percent sap, but its spirit is anything but cloying, thanks to persuasive performances, most notably from Rachel McAdams.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

You know what you want to see if you want to see The Notebook...You want to see girls in pretty 1940s dresses, soldiers in stirring World War II uniforms, handsome automobiles and equally handsome Southern landscapes. You want to see romance overcome adversity.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Rowlands is superb, as usual, and Garner partners her with the grace of a dancer. Cassavetes's directing style is slow and stilted, though, indicating yet again that his notion of moviemaking is the opposite of everything his father, the great John Cassavetes, stood for.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

You won't necessarily applaud The Notebook's excesses, but its final moments of grace will leave you in a sodden heap on the theater floor.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

To their credit, director Nick Cassavetes and screenwriter Jeremy Leven heighten the melodrama and seize on the most distinctive strokes of Nicholas Sparks' bland best seller.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

TV Guide Angel Cohn

Cassavetes' film is unusually well-acted and lovely to look at, but his wholehearted embrace of saccharine melodrama and tendency to let scenes ramble on long after their point has been expressed makes for some slow going.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Hs a single goal: to prod your tear ducts to open up. It is very, very good at this task. Whether The Notebook is good in any other respect is a bit more complicated.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

The Notebook is meant to be a romantic weepy, and you will shed tears - but only from the consistent and exhausting effort of trying to control your gag reflex. Even a body that welcomes a sugar fix will repel a sugar invasion.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Mercilessly plodding pacing, problematic character motivations and a fundamental lack of chemistry between the two star-crossed lovers in question don't do a lot to help its cause.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Opening shots tend to say a lot about a movie, but they say everything about The Notebook, a glossy adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' four-hanky sudser.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

From the first soft piano that accompanies white geese flying toward a humongous orange sunset, The Notebook racks up the sugary clichés till you’re screaming for mercy.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

I have the same allergic reaction to this open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel that inspired it.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Two hours of the worst sort of sentimental sap.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.