How To Deal: Critic Reviews

In an age when most teenagers are up to their eyeballs in postmodern consumer glitz, [Moore's] movies seem radical not just in their retro squareness but in their unfashionable embrace of faith over ironic flippancy.

After a while the bad lighting, graceless editing, sluggish dialogue and self-conscious performances begin to seem like marks of authenticity, as if the movie had been made not just for and about teenagers, but by them.

Moore and Ford rise above the hackneyed story, infusing the proceedings with their own chemistry and appeal. If only the adults responsible for this film could learn how to deal.

A bad, unimaginative story posing pretentiously as the very opposite.

Another soundtrack-driven, disposable, not entirely objectionable teen movie.

This movie is the worst episode of Gilmore Girls ever.

Producers smooshed the plots of two Sarah Dessen teen novels into one flick.

May serve as training wheels for the next generation of romance novel fans.

How to Deal is a 'dramady' of a film, with first-time director Clare Kilner fighting valiantly to balance its heaviness with humor. Though it's no Terms of Endearment, she pulls it off.

Require[s] only the presence of Scott Baio to qualify as fodder for an after-school special.

It's too heavy on issues and too light on just observing the characters and enjoying their freshness.

[A] more-thoughtful -than-average film.

The film, based on Sarah Dessen's young-adult novels Someone Like You and That Summer, isn't that good. But Moore is.

It's refreshing to see young people grappling with substantive matters for a change, but Clare Kilner piles on enough angst to fuel a month of soap opera.

There's one way to deal with Mandy Moore's new drama, How to Deal: Don't.

A bland romance that suffers from choppy development, dramatic overload and dearth of personality.

Teen soap opera.

You do need a pretty strong stomach to swallow this sappy teen soaper.

Very melodramatic.

There's a kind of timeless, weirdly chaste 'nowhereness' to the whole enterprise, its dilemmas and behaviours as applicable to 1973 as 2003.

Painless to watch, but it's marred by some significant flaws.

That rarity, a movie aimed at teens that doesn't insult their intelligence.

The pop diva goes down with the bubbles in this hopelessly shallow soap opera.

Some moments ring true, others seem contrived, but the film is by and large sustained by strong central performances and by its depth.

Even Moore fans may find this hard to deal with.