Metacritic reviews

Moore makes Halley's awakening organic and touching. In an age when most teenagers are up to their eyeballs in postmodern consumer glitz, her movies seem radical not just in their retro squareness but in their unfashionable embrace of faith over ironic flippancy.

This is a movie whose title promises to show teenage viewers how to cope with the messed-up, grown-up world they are entering, not how to make it perfect -- or even how to make sense of it.

There's pleasure to be had in a film that suggests teen life can be hard without necessarily being tragic.

Works up some genuine emotion offset by occasional humor and creates individuals of a certain degree of complexity, but the film is glazed over with an aura of artificiality.

Competently if unremarkably directed by Englishwoman Clare Kilner, should prove compelling enough to Moore's huge legion of fans.

The sad truth is that TV series like "Dawson's Creek" do a better job with precocious teen dialogue.

Director Claire Kilner and screenwriter Neena Beber don't walk the tightrope between comedy and drama skillfully enough to make either aspect work as well as it should.

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

Just the umpteenth replay of the girl-meets-boy/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl story.

Embodies all that's wrong with the sellout culture of Hollywood.