The Notebook (2004)
Based on Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 novel “The Notebook”
This list just wouldn’t seem complete without including this Nicholas Sparks-adapted romance film that has seemed to move a generation. Even if you’ve never actually seen Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as Allie and Noah, a couple whose love is tested by social notions and 1940’s life in the American South, you know the basics of the story and how momentous it has been for the modern romantic movie industry. (Remember all the book-to-movie adaptations of not only Nicholas Sparks’s works but of many authors’s stories in the same genre?) Though the plot has moments that are a little tired, the relationship is made real and raw by McAdams and Gosling’s performances. It’s kind of iconic.
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