Gritty, grimy, and groundbreaking for its time, few films have been more avant-garde in approach, nor more perpetually relevant than Midnight Cowboy.

| Jun 8, 2023

[John Schlesinger's] spray of venom is just about overpowering, yet the two actors and the simple Of Mice and Men kind of relationship at the heart of the story save the picture.

| Jul 29, 2022

The characters’ dreams and memories intermingle with their daily actions, sometimes combining in surreal ways. The camerawork is amazing, capturing vistas of glory and grime from the dawn of 1970s New York.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Mar 25, 2022

Director John Schlesinger and screenwriter Waldo Salt pump so much emotion into it that it becomes a moving epitaph both to its two striving characters and the American dream itself.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 14, 2022

Midnight Cowboy is America's challenge to any film from foreign shores... From now on, it is going to be difficult for the cinema snob to declare tritely that films in this country are made for immature audiences.

| Mar 14, 2022

The movie is brilliantly acted by newcomer Jon Voight, in the lead, and Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo, his pathetic companion. Not only a study of loneliness, the movie probes the depths of love.

| Mar 11, 2022

Both performances are masterly. Rizzo, the human wreck, is a dream of a part and Hoffman plays him for all he is worth, gradually turning our disgust into sympathy. Voight's identification with Joe Buck is so perfect, he doesn't seem to be acting at all.

| Mar 11, 2022

The film is a masterpiece, one of the finest ever made. It is staggering, shattering, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic, raw and absurd. Midnight Cowboy surpasses even The Graduate in its uniqueness, sensitivity, and curious blend of the sad and the funny.

| Mar 11, 2022

John Schlesinger, the British director who gave us Darling and Far From the Madding Crowd, has had the audacity to come to this country and capture on film the flavor of sun-baked West Texas and seamy New York City better than any director before him.

| Mar 11, 2022

Nothing so completely heart-warming and compassionate has ever come from something so sleazy. The performances are simply immense.

| Mar 11, 2022

This is obviously the sort of film in which people argue endlessly about which of the principals steals it, and the argument is irresistible, if pointless. Both are very good, in different ways.

| Mar 11, 2022

Mr. Voight's and Mr. Hoffman's performances are pretty well impossible to fault. I found the film profoundly touching and funny, and quite hypnotically enjoyable to watch.

| Mar 11, 2022

Englishman John Schlesinger's portrait of New York is the sharpest and most accurate I have seen -- tremendously funny, wry and deadly in its revelations of that city's loneliness and savagery.

| Mar 11, 2022

Only a very sure filmmaker would dare suggest that the wages of sin is love. Only a superb film could make us believe it.

| Mar 11, 2022

Schlesinger has not only made a technically adroit and profoundly humane film: he has also provided the framework for some marvelous screen acting.

| Mar 11, 2022

Making bold use of the permissiveness of our uninhibited present-day artistic codes, this "X” picture takes the viewer through sickening disillusionment and degradation in a young man's bitter story.

| Mar 11, 2022

Midnight Cowboy is an extraordinary movie, a compelling movie, a movie rich and powerful enough to print its images indelibly on the mind's eye. It just may turn out to be The Great American Movie.

| Mar 11, 2022

This superb film won't be seen by persons under 18. In the implied vernacular of the code, the "X" means "off-limits." In my book (in this particular case), it stands for "X-cellence."

| Mar 11, 2022

It is a realistic horror tale of our time dramatizing the isolation of modern man, lightened by humor that is sometimes sick and sometimes farcical.

| Mar 11, 2022

Midnight Cowboy is the grubbiest movie of the year. Despite its weaknesses it is also one of the best so far -- running a close second to Easy Rider.

| Mar 11, 2022