Country Strong 
 
 The corn is as high as a mechanical bull’s eye in “Country Strong,” a runny-mascara melodrama about a country-western superstar warbling, weeping and wailing her way back from another stint in rehab to the glare of the stage. That would be the tall, middle-age female who's apparently Kelly's wardrobe woman and follows her everywhere like those well-paid and not indifferent support people in the lives of stars. And Hedlund's Beau would do anything for a woman — or two women, in this case. You first see those gems twinkling in the daylight as Kelly lies across a bed, listening as a young attendant and musician, Beau Hutton (an appealing Garrett Hedlund), serenades her with his crying guitar and moist eyes. Given that Kelly’s husband and manager, James, is played by the country-western star Tim McGraw, whose recent film resumé leans toward good guys in weepies like “The Blind Side,” it’s soon obvious that James isn’t the villain either. No, the big bad here is fame, which ostensibly claws at Kelly from within and without.
– Critics make no bones about it: Skip Country Strong. (It's got a 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, though audiences are more generous at 50%.) A familiar tale of the struggle with fame, the Gwyneth Paltrow flick is pure schlock, they say: It’s “a runny-mascara melodrama” in which “the corn is as high as a mechanical bull’s eye,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. Paltrow’s character “is a compendium of stereotypes about women forced to choose between career and love (guess which wins), while keeping an eye on the younger competition.” “The cast is sucked dry of any juice by Shana Feste, whose script is laughably inauthentic and whose direction marshals clichés as if they were freshly minted,” notes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “The dialogue could sink Streep.” Roger Ebert is more tolerant in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Country Strong is one of the best movies of 1957, and I mean that sincerely as a compliment.” It’s “a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.”