What an appropriate title, even though I’m not entirely sure it fits the film, or tells you anything about this coming of age tale, but it definitely is appropriate for a subset of reasons. One of my readers looped me in a conversation on the lack of nuance anymore about being average, or being (as the kids say) “mid”. If someone asks me “How was it?”, I feel like “It was OK” gets dissected into my tone, body language, inflection, and beaten to death until the person who asked has the binary answer they are looking for, which is “should they watch it?” Sure.

The Midway Point is quite literally the midway point of my rankings.It is smack dab in the middle of the pack, as it is good enough to not be bad, but also not remarkable enough to be in the same echelon as good, great, or excellent fare. I find reviewing titles at the midway point to be the hardest, because people look for concrete reasons to do or not to do things, and for me, when I force myself into the Fresh/Rotten mold, it is like doing the Pros/Cons spreadsheet. What was good about it, and what was bad.

This is a pretty basic coming of age teen dramady with romantic entanglements. Our lead, Jack (Sean Ryan Fox) is an autistic high schooler just doing his best to get through high school, when his life is disrupted by a free spirit Senior, Alice (Katherine Daddario), who seems to like him. So, he does what any teen boy would do, and chooses her, spending time with her, and it affects other aspects of his life. Suddenly he’s asking his mom (Thora Birch) to call the school to have him get out because he has a headache, but he really just wants to legally skip with Alice. He starts doing poorly on his homework, because of course he does. But is this teen love real? Or, is Alice just bored? We’ve been in this scenario countless times before, and making the lead autistic isn’t even a big swing in 2026. Making sure he’s authentically cast is about the biggest thing you can do, but more and more people are doing that.

I sat through An Autumn Summer, a film that prioritized cast cohesion over plot and story, so I was slightly refreshed to sit through an average coming of age story that did have characters, plot, and story. Sure, it lacked the feel of dropping in on a real family, and everyone here is clearly an actor, but I need momentum. Art for arts sake sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.

The Midway Point doesn’t have a performance in it that stands out, nor does it have one that is bad. Wes Studi is perhaps underutilized as a comic shop owner, but Katherine Daddario, sister to Alexandra Daddario, has all the charisma her sister has. Fox, in the lead role is fine, and I just hope he was authentically cast. To be frank, I have no idea who he is, so there can’t be an argument of using an actor on name recognition. We have enough talent on the spectrum to fill this role, so I hope, again, authentic.

The cons here are mostly that other films do it better, because of course they do. Do we stop making shark movies because no one will ever top Jaws? What if no one made a serial killer film after Psycho, because it was clearly so perfect. If the world accepted 2001 as the greatest science fiction work ever, we would have never gotten Star Wars. Of course we keep making films, even if they feel familiar. Hell, if you’re Hallmark, familiarity is your brand.

This was picked up by a distributor unconcerned with theatrical, and likely unable to help this find the young adult audience it requires to thrive anyway. The best thing I can do for it, is stay on the positive side, because while they aren’t strong, the pros outweigh the cons. Just simply not being as good as other things, being decidedly average or mediocre doesn’t inherently make you a bad film, and that’s the nuance we’re losing. By no means would I certify this as fresh, but I also would never tell anyone not to check it out if they wanted. I’m not going to spend years of my life championing it either, as some new classic, but this film floated around some mid-tier festivals and is being distributed by a just lucky to be here distributor. I’m not sure we can be picky.

It may not be the review the film wants, because I’m not storming the gates calling this a triumph. The fact is, that if you draw a line, this film has just enough charm, the cast has just enough chemistry, the leads have just enough charisma, the story is written with just enough interest, and it is directed just fine enough to deserve to be on this side of the line. If we all toppled every film because we could think of something better, almost no film would be fresh. This follows a tried and true teen drama, coming of age formula, and for my money, it hit all the right beats.

Even though I didn’t have audio description, it was even one of those things where I knew, because adding accessibility to a film is a nearly 99.9% chance of gaining at least a 0.1 to a grade, simply through a better understanding of everything, that it would be fresh if it had audio description certainly. It might even go a few more points higher. Maybe I’m too nice, but I also got into this because I love film, and I wanted to sing aobut films I loved that maybe people hadn’t seen yet. There’s nothing better than recommending something to a stranger, and them coming back and thanking you for the recommendation.

The Midway Point might literally be at the midway point of film in 2026, but in a binary world, there’s far more here to appreciate than not, and it is more worthy of your time than several other misfires this year.

Fresh: 6.0/10