10 Bafflingly High IMDb Movie Ratings You Won't Believe
10. The Notebook
IMDb Rating: 8.0 The Notebook may not have been the first Nicholas Sparks' adaptation, but it was the one that really cemented cheap adaptations of the writer's sappy romance stories as their own sub-genre. Noah and Allie's 'only in the movies' relationship is chock full of clichés and specifically engineered to see a spike in the Kleenex shares. It's a movie targeted at one audience and it hits that target very well, but that it's managed to play wide enough to win over even genre cynics is something of a surprise. A present-day framing device allows for a rather perfunctory 'twist' that's just about unpredictable enough to cause many to rate it an extra star or so higher, but that still doesn't account for the level of praise the 8.0 suggests. The Notebook's ridiculously high rating serves as a reminder that film buffs are far from the only voice in movies, with the movie playing well with a less cine-literate audience. This is reflected in the RottenTomatoes stats for the film - 52% on the Tomatometer, but a whopping 85% audience approval.