By Nigel Reynolds

Heaven forbid that the world's two most famous Scientologists, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, should be at odds.

There has been a flurry of activity in America this week after US Weekly reported Cruise saying he was underwhelmed by Travolta's new film, Battlefield Earth, a piece of futuristic mumbo-jumbo based on a book by L Ron Hubbard, the controversial founder of Scientology.

US Weekly went further and said that Cruise and his wife, Nicole Kidman, had also "quietly severed their ties" with the Church of Scientology.

This was too much. Pat Kingley of PMK, the PR firm with real celebrity clout, extracted a prominent apology from the mag. We have "found out", said the mag, that Cruise remains "an active and committed member" of the church and that he had "neither said nor hinted at anything negative about the movie".

If he had been rude about the film, he would have been in the good company of film critics, some of whom called it the worst movie of the century.