Hollywood Reporter: "The Last Song" Review

Hollywood Reporter: The 17-year-old starlet runs through a gamut of emotions from anger and love to sorrow and joy. She romps on a beach, has a mud fight, saves baby sea-turtles, smooches with a guy and models any number of gowns, even adjusting her breasts in one outfit to emphasize how grown-up she has become.

The movie so deftly mixes sentimentality, romance and bathos in just the right measures that her fans and maybe new ones will enjoy the new Miley.

If publicity notes are to be believed, best-selling author Nicholas Sparks even wrote his novel and screenplay with Cyrus in mind. What more can a girl ask for? Overseeing the production is first-time feature director Julie Anne Robinson, who has worked in British and American television. She can't do much about the contrivances in the script Sparks wrote with an old friend, Jeff Van Wie. But she gives Cyrus room to display a winning personality and charm.

Sparks' shameless formula is to introduce illness, death or social differences to punch emotional buttons and jerk tears. This is a writer who never trusts his characters to move you without these artificial stimulants -- witness such books-to-movies as "Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember," "The Notebook" and only last month "Dear John."

Cyrus' Ronnie Miller is a teen from a broken home who has internalized her bitterness over her parents' divorce and closed off her emotions. Most of her blame, however, is reserved for her father, Steve (Greg Kinnear). Now she and her kid brother (Bobby Coleman) must spend a summer at his Georgia beachfront house, so she's not happy. She pouts and ignores Dad for awhile, but a romance with a beach hunk named Will (Liam Hemsworth, nicely hiding his Australian accent) pulls her out of her funk; she even settles down for a heart-to-heart with Dad.

So where's the story going to go if all conflicts and issues are resolved before the midpoint? Ah, that's where Sparks' special formula comes in. First, Will tells Ronnie about the death of his brother the previous year that shattered his family despite their unimaginable wealth. Then someone -- no spoilers here -- gets sick.

Disney has gone all out to bring its star into her comfort zone. The studio surrounds Cyrus with seasoned pros in Kinnear and Kelly Preston (as her mom), gives her a handsome, almost-too-nice leading man, brings her real mother aboard as executive producer and fills the soundtrack with songs by popular artists, including two songs performed by Cyrus.

The script makes her a gifted pianist, so she doesn't lose that music connection even if she only sings on camera for a few moments. And a message about music and familial love bringing joy to one's life strays not one bit off the Disney reservation. Nor does the hokey story and chaste romance.

E! Online - Miley Kisses and Tells & Liam's Parents Loved Miley

We're all aware that Miley Cyrus is dating Liam Hemsworth, her hot, tall Australian Last Song costar and that they’re all official, but just how serious is it? Well, she's already met his parents...

"Yeah, they loved her," Liam tells Michael Yo on tonight's Daily 10. Mom and pop Hemsworth were introduced to their son's GF on a recent trip to his hometown in Australia.

"It was really cool to show Miley where I'm from and how I grew up, and it's a completely different world to where she's from," Liam went on. "We don't have shopping centers or traffic lights or anything like that, where I live at least."

And Miley says she loved it Down Under, too—mostly because the paparazzi there are way cooler than the ones here...

"It was awesome, I really like Australia," Miley tells M.Yo. "You know what? The media's really cool there, too. Even though there's paparazzi, they kind of stay their distance; it was kind of like Nashville by the sea actually, the town he's from."

Kelly Preston About Playing Miley's Mom In "The Last Song"

Just six months after losing her 16-year-old son Jett last January, Kelly Preston quietly decided to return to work by starring in The Last Song.

She made the decision "because Miley [Cyrus] asked me herself to play her mom," Preston, 47, tells PEOPLE. "I was really moved. It was the perfect movie to sort of get my feet wet."

As they filmed the Nicholas Sparks drama in Tybee Island, Ga., last summer, "Julie Anne [Robinson, the director], Adam [Shankman, the producer] and Miley took such great care of me," says Preston, who brought her daughter Ella Bleu, 9, along for the trip. "They were wonderful with my schedule. I just worked a little bit."

But she spent a lot of time bonding with Cyrus off screen. "We've been friends for awhile," Cyrus told PEOPLE in January. "We got even closer on this movie so it was cool to spend the summer with people you really like.
“I love her so much,” Preston says of her costar. “She’s such a good girl.”