Midnight Cowboy: Critic Reviews

It is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42nd Street.

The performances by Hoffman and Voight are big.

What has happened to Midnight Cowboy is that we've done our own editing job on it. We've forgotten the excesses and the detours, and remembered the purity of the central characters and the Voight and Hoffman performances.

The acting, showy and instinctual, is most of the movie; the visual style is too forced and chicly distended to let the drama acquire much natural life of its own.

In this film the scenery is lovely and only the human race is vile.

Superb performances and a compelling script have made this film a strange mix of Oscar-winner and Cult Classic.

The movie is locked into a sixties stylistic approach that can feel dated, but Hoffman's performance can prevent one from ever tiring of the film.

An impressive and enduring evocation of time and place, this is a moving low-life drama built around Oscar-winning writing and performances.

Talented Englishman Schlesinger had an unerring eye for capturing the grimy reality of New York, even if his directorial style is more jittery than is really necessary.

Great performances from Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman cap this bravest Academy Awards Best Picture choice in history.

Outrageously overrated at the cynical end of the Swinging Sixties.

A film you won't soon forget

It only takes a movie like Midnight Cowboy to point out the limitations of a rating system: How can a measly four stars convey the magnificence of this acknowledged classic?

Sometimes a time capsule never dates.

Schlesinger's frenzied style and visual pyrotechnics (New Wave influence) are less impressive than the characters and the central friendship between Joe Buck and Ratso, splendidly played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.

Drove its spurs into the bucking bronco of 1970s cinema.

A classic film that shows a great work has no era...

Still powerful story of two losers in New York.

A maverick effort.

It might have been fun, but it's condescending and stupidly mean-spirited instead.