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75Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.
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70Country Strong is a charmer that makes you forgive all of its false notes simply because the talent plays them with conviction.
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70That rare ensemble piece in which all four principals are not only compellingly drawn but handled with an astute sense of dramatic balance.
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67Hedlund's got a hell of a voice, rotgut-ragged, and whether he's crooning or wooing, whatever he's selling, and no matter how cornpone, I'm buying.
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63The glaring weakness of Country Strong is James, underwritten and ambiguous, more like Kelly's pimp than her manager.
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63Country Strong is a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.
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63Country Strong feels powerfully familiar.
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Mar 21, 201160C&W lovers will lap it up - look out for some stellar Nashville cameos - and there's big-lunged uplift to see you through the cornball plot turns.
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60What saves Country Strong from drowning in its own tears are the leads, all four of whom imbue Feste's unabashedly clichéd script with some genuine humanity.
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58The film keeps throwing things at you: drunk scenes, adultery scenes, "All About Eve" rise-of-the-young-rival scenes. Yet despite the presence of some appealing actors, none of it quite adds up.
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50In Country Strong, the Oscar-winning Paltrow gets upstaged and outacted by the kid from "Tron" and the snotty brat from "Gossip Girl." Who'd have thought?
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50Shana Feste's screenplay seldom rises above the level of daytime TV; the only actor who triumphs over her trite dialogue is Tim McGraw in a nonsinging role as Paltrow's husband and manager.
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50Patsy Cline. Loretta Lynn. Gwyneth Paltrow. If you buy that progression, you'll buy Country Strong, an unintentionally campy drama.
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Jan 6, 201150Country Strong has a pleasant soundtrack of conservative country music, many of the tunes newly written for the movie, some of them performed by old pros and some of them performed by the cast.
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50A tough slog through emotional swamplands. It's murky when it needs to be clear. But Hedlund is the big news here.
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50Though seriously miscast as an unreformed alcoholic, the bronzed Ms. Paltrow gets by with a thin, serviceable voice (she sings her own songs) and an actor's confidence.
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50Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.
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50My God is this script predictable. Each relapse and betrayal shows up announced, and then announced again, a little louder, by the dialogue equivalent of an aggravating doorman.
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50Country Strong is Feste's second film, and she infuses it with an earnestness that swings between too too much and appealing, the same earnestness that swamped her filmmaker debut last year with "The Greatest."
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42Country Strong is the latest and, in many ways, the least impressive entrant in the achy-breaky sweepstakes.
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42When she's (Paltrow) singing, she can pass for someone who's been listening to Tammy Wynette since the cradle; when the music stops, she looks like a tourist.
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40Feste's ode to showbiz clichés is closer to contemporary Nashville pop: twangy enough to qualify as Southern-fried, but too slick and disposable to be truly deep.
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40Several good performances are left adrift, as the characters roam from scene to scene, singing (quite well) as they go. Even as a sort of long-form music video, it's disjointed.
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38A little like modern country music - odd moments of sincerity, heart and authenticity peek through the plastic, the hype and the manufactured hokum.
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Jan 6, 201138Disjointed drama filled with one-dimensional characters and melodrama so Lifetime movie-esque that it careens into unintentional comedy.
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30Country Strong comes to spontaneous life from time to time, despite maudlin devices and manipulative set pieces.
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Dec 24, 201030Country Strong is sillier - and more tone-deaf - than Paltrow's advice website, GOOP.
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30Feste, who has one previous effort as a writer-director, last year's "The Greatest," fails here to do the most basic thing -- give an audience a rooting interest, or any interest at all, in these four troubled people.
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25Country Strong is a country music melodrama, but I'm not sure which country.
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25This lame-ass chick-flick sampling of "Crazy Heart" is more like country Kryptonite.