Thirteen-year-old twin brothers are forced to shack up with their evil, country-bumpkin grandmother during World War II in Le Grand Cahier, Hungarian director János Szász's rather detached adaptation of Agota Kristof's heart-rending, French-language best-seller The Notebook. Technically almost too immaculate, the film smoothens many of the original's rough edges, replacing the book's unreliable and disturbing children's point of view with a distancing voice-over, cute animated sequences and two stone-faced performances that make it hard to care about these identical siblings who decide to train themselves in cruelty so they'll stand a better chance of surviving the war. (source)
