Dear John Is More Nicholas Sparks Schmaltz

Dear John, the latest Nicholas Sparks film adaptation, works familiar territory: ooey-gooey love. Critics aren't falling for the tale of long-distance romance between an American soldier stationed in the Middle East (Channing Tatum) and his dream girl back home (Amanda Seyfried).

• Tom Horgen of the Minneapolis Star Tribune decries the movie's "Sparksian schmaltz," panning director Lasse Hallstrom for leaving the audience with "a giggle-worthy mess."

• Linda Barnard of the Toronto Star says it's "a sappy version of the old letters-from-the-trenches weepers of the 1940s that hobbles along despite the best effort of its cast and a director who ought to know better."
• "The uneasy combination of the World Trade Center, Sparks and schmaltzmeister director Lasse Hallstrom pushed me perilously close to nausea and diabetic shock, not to mention deep sleep," moans Lou Lumenick of the New York Post.
• "Bogart and Bergman it's not," writes Mack Bates for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

(More Amanda Seyfried stories.)