Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Joe Buck is a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy New York City women; he finds a companion in Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, an ailing swindler with a bum leg and a quixotic fantasy of escaping to Florida.
Midnight Cowboy is a landmark American film — the only X-rated film to win Best Picture — with extraordinary performances from Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, and a vérité New York aesthetic that feels utterly singular. The plot is a quietly devastating character study of loneliness and misplaced dreams. The cinematography, mixing handheld grit with surrealist flashback sequences, is visually inventive. Its novelty is undeniable: no Hollywood film of its era captured urban alienation and male vulnerability quite this way. The ending, while emotionally resonant and thematically appropriate, is somewhat telegraphed and not quite as surprising as the journey that precedes it, preventing a perfect sweep.