The Long Walk Home

A powerful and affecting film, so well played by Goldberg and Spacek that we understand not just the politics of the time but the emotions as well. Read full review

Suspense is the key element in The Long Walk Home. That may seem like a frivolous thing to say about a fictionalized but scrupulously authentic account of the 1955 civil rights bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. Yet it's what holds this movie together, gives it distinction and makes it considerably more than a TV-movie-style docudrama. That, and the richly imagined performances of Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg. [15 Feb 1991, p.24]

One of those rare movie history lessons that don't make you feel as if you're facing the chalkboard. It's an impassioned movie, with vehement, soulful performances from Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek, but it's also a work of great restraint and proportion.  Read full review

Both actresses are quite fine. The role of Odessa is somewhat underwritten, but Goldberg, playing her as a modest, God-fearing woman, acts with a deep-buried determination. If she’d been allowed to show some of her humor, the character might have soared. Spacek gives a beautifully modulated performance.  Read full review

Funny, heartbreaking and, yes, uplifting, The Long Walk Home takes the audience into a past that is always threatening to become the present; that it was made makes the future seem a little less threatening. [09 Feb 1991]

The Long Walk Home sounds as if it's going to be one of those primers in contemporary social history with made-for-TV written all over it. This is much, much better - even worthy of the big screen. [21 Dec 1990, p.5D]

A respectably stirring film about the rupturing birth of civil rights in the South. Although most of Walk Home heads down this ready-for-prime-time moral path, director Richard Pearce and screenwriter John Cork uncover some interesting dramatic grays along the way.  Read full review

The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay. Read full review

An effectively mounted drama about the human impact of changing times on two families, with sturdy performances by Sissy Spacek as an uppercrust white housewife and Whoopi Goldberg as her maid. Read full review

It’s a pretty intense film at times, and it may be too earnest for its own good; but it’s a finely acted film and one that also firmly makes a connection between the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of the women’s movement, as Spacek begins to find her spine and come out of her protective “good wife” shell. Read full review

Like Driving Miss Daisy this deals with a white employer and a black servant in the times of revolution, not only that but in both films it's a jaded view with the servant being loyal and not a 'friend'. Besides that small problem, it's a moving film with a steady performance from Spacek, but by the end it has definitely become Goldberg's film. Read full review

Well-acted, likably small-scale, full of good intentions, but hardly a corker. Read full review

A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make.  Read full review