“In SHERMAN’S MARCH, Mr. McElwee more or less follows Sherman’s trail in that he visits Atlanta, Savannah and Columbia, S.C. Occasionally he even stops off at a Civil War battlefield, fort or monument. Primarily, though, he’s picking up pretty, oddball young women or looking up old girlfriends, most of whom are now committed to other people. Quite early, he confides that the movie really is ”a meditation on the possibility of romantic love in the South today.” Or, to put it another way, is romantic love possible in an age of supermarkets, fast food, nuclear arms and the sort of lightweight camera and sound equipment that allows anybody to film his own life?…

“Though Mr. McElwee’s timing with women is awful, he’s a film maker-anthropologist with a rare appreciation for the eccentric details of our edgy civilization.”

- Vincent Canby, The New York Times, September 5, 1986

“Though documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee had been making quirkily personal essay films for over a decade before bringing SHERMAN’S MARCH to Park City, something about the film’s combination of Cold War anxiety, relationship woes, and McElwee’s conflicted feelings about his Southern origins clicked with a wider audience, dragging McElwee (and, arguably, Sundance) out of the “regional film” ghetto and into multiple festival appearances and PBS airings for the next couple of years. SHERMAN’S MARCH won the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category in 1987, setting the stage for the likes of Michael Moore and every other first-person filmmaker who, in years to come, would use the Sundance forum to turn the camera on themselves and express their concerns—though usually with little of McElwee’s wit or deftness.”

- Scott Tobias and Noel Murray, AV Club, “10 Sundance Sensations That Changed Filmmaking”, January 14, 2008