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Critics Consensus: Southside With You looks back on a fateful real-life date with strong performances and engaging dialogue, adding up to a romance that makes for a pretty good date movie in its own right.
Critic Consensus: Southside With You looks back on a fateful real-life date with strong performances and engaging dialogue, adding up to a romance that makes for a pretty good date movie in its own right.
All Critics (151) | Top Critics (41) | Fresh (138) | Rotten (13)
A small, successful sketch of now-great lives.
Southside With You showcases a city as photogenic, dynamic, and charming as the lovers themselves.
This is a small-scale romance with small ambitions but fairly big heart.
President Obama's fans and haters alike will find something to enjoy in this slightly stilted yet oddly fascinating account of the Harvard law student's first date with Michelle Robinson, the woman who would eventually become his wife.
A gentle, rose-tinted piece of political nostalgia-one that glances at the divisions in American society, but still casts a optimistic view toward whatever's next.
Though it's barely 84 minutes long, this buoyant yet reflective movie captures the ever-shifting mood of a daylong encounter that changed both its protagonists' lives.
First there was the rom-com. Then the zom-rom-com. Now we have the world's first obam-rom-com.
There's a pleasant texture to the visuals of Southside With You, a soft visual style that compliments the two stellar leads.
Southside With You is a rare love story. One that doesn't put on rose tinted glasses and magic moments. Instead, the film focuses on real, obtainable love.
It's sweet and honest in its simplicity, and despite an ultra-low budget that can barely mask that the events aren't actually taking place in the late 80s, Tanne still manages something softly entrancing.
"Southside With You" is a sweet, romantic film, but one that is layered with intelligence, relationship, and character building. It's an engaging re-imagining of the Obamas' first date.
Southside With You is a lovely notion, a celebratory biography, and a slightly presumptuous memorial all wrapped up in a dreamy romantic date movie.
An interesting look at the build up and events of the first date of the Obamas. Well acted, with great dialogue and a great likeness of both characters makes this an enjoyable romantic movie.
Super Reviewer
The two leads captivate us with strong performances in this simple walk-and-talk film, playing intelligent characters who spend a day together on a date through black culture in America, but the movie is also a bit too respectful and borders occasionally on hagiography.
Any movie that decides to play Janet Jackson over its opening credits is off to a good start. Especially when it's "Miss You Much," coupled with eighties inspired pink text flashing across the screen. From the opening scene Southside With You sets the tone of a late summer day on the streets of Chicago at the tail end of that decade we've all suddenly become enamored with nostalgia for. It is 1989 and Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) is getting set to accompany the summer associate she is advising at the law firm she works for to a town meeting to address local community issues. As the lone African-American woman working at this law firm Robinson has had to work doubly hard in order to gain the respect she desires and she's not about to let the first charismatic, smooth-talking black guy convince her to undo all that hard work by going on a date with him. Or is she? It just so happens this young, summer associate is a hotshot from Harvard named Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers). And so, yes, Southside With You is the story of the first date between the now President and First Lady of these United States of America via the lens of something akin to director Richard Linklater's Before trilogy. It's a clichéd comparison at this point, but an apt one as the majority of Southside With You is filled by our two main characters walking and talking. If you haven't seen Linklater's trilogy that chronicles a couple meeting and spending a single night together that was little more than that in 1995 it is the epitome of characters walking and talking. Chronicling that magic of how perfect strangers can connect so intimately over a short period of time and analyzing that indescribable feeling that creates a strong, trusting bond between two people-a bond that will inevitably turn to love-Linklater's films provide a nice template for how to both simply and intricately weave together the innocence of falling for someone and the complex emotions that will inevitably come with circumstance. Linklater has returned to his characters in ten year intervals with sequels in 2004 and 2013, but with Southside With You writer/director Richard Tanne takes notes largely from that initial meeting treating his characters not as the future Mr. and Mrs. President, but simply as two people in that awkward phase between true adolescence and true adulthood who are just trying to figure themselves and the world they live in out. read the whole review at www.reviewsfromabed.com
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