Moving Midway Reviews
Top Critic
About.com
Godfrey Cheshire, a highly acclaimed film critic, uses his cinematic smarts and sensibility to good effect in "Moving Midway," his documentary about the relocation of his ancestral home, an antebellum N.C. plantation named Midway.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Film Threat
It is more successful as a study of Dixie social sciences than as a family video diary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Creative Loafing
The details behind the actual move are the least interesting part of the film; far more compelling is the "history" of slavery as presented through a polished Hollywood veneer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
PopMatters
The myth of the Southern plantation incorporates and carries on visions of destiny and history, industry and identity.
Film-Forward.com
Cheshire deftly interweaves different interpretations of the antebellum South, through architecture, family memories (black and white), history, and popular culture.
Full Review
| Original Score: 9/10
In its 98 minutes, film critic Godfrey Cheshire's documentary Moving Midway records an amazing architectural feat, and that's the least of its virtues.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
What begins as a leave-taking turns into a homecoming that reflects the mixed-race society of the modern south.
MTV
Moving Midway isn't a simple-minded brotherhood-of-man tract. The film is spiked with artfully edited excerpts from some of the movies that have shaped American racial attitudes over the years.
Moving Midway tells three stories, each one worthy of a film of its own.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
L.A. Weekly
Southern myths rise up, then drop like flies in the enthralling documentary Moving Midway, and all because director Godfrey Cheshire's cousin is moving house. Literally.
ColeSmithey.com
The film offers a probing and patient analyses of converging social movements related to everything from the nomination of the country's first black President to how people relate their family's history.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The whole idea of foundation -- as it applies to family, history, and an actual, stately American house -- receives a thoughtful inspection in Moving Midway, the graceful nonfiction film from Godfrey Cheshire.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Godfrey Cheshire's Moving Midway, from his own screenplay, provides a profound meditation on the paradoxes of race in America through a discovery of his own Southern family's hitherto hidden secrets.
NewsBlaze
An admirable examination of one family's belated attempt to come to grips with, if not atone for, its role in America's original sin.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
There is a satisfyingly Faulknerian air of bizarreness about the episode, and the shots of the grand old house being trundled down country roads are amazing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Tells a fascinating and complicated story of regional identity.
| Original Score: 4/5
