[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

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

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

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

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

Voight is in fact a major addition to the family of important American actors and his portrayal of a good-hearted lunk whom life has kicked around pretty good and who tries to create one myth so to pursue another, is damned near perfect.

| Mar 11, 2022

They have tried to balance tragedy and slapstick. Whether it succeeds or not is a matter of personal taste. For me, it doesn’t.

| Mar 10, 2022

Midnight Cowboy leaves a person out of breath, feeling sad and kind of washed out but, at the same time, as if something beautiful had taken place right in front of everybody -- a vision of tender truth in unlikely circumstances.

| Mar 10, 2022

Midnight Cowboy is at times invigoratingly funny, at others despairingly sad. It is tripped up by some glaring flaws in the script, but buoyed up by a great theme song and two tremendous performances.

| Mar 10, 2022

It is savage, often sordid. It is also often very funny in a raunchy, rancid sort of way. And it examines its people as humans, not freaks.

| Mar 10, 2022

What is meant to be a quest for desperate companionship results only in a honkytonk tour of slag movie fare.

| Mar 9, 2022

Though Schiesinger's method constantly undermines the individuality of his displaced heroes, it is a reflection on the superb and largely unsentimental performances of both Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman that one cares almost too much about them.

| Feb 6, 2020

A marvel.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 13, 2019

Schlesinger's camera discovers everywhere something rarely glimpsed in Hollywood movies - poverty.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 12, 2019

For a street opera with incongruous inspirations and mix-and-match aspirations, Midnight Cowboy is startlingly accomplished.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2019