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.
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.
– Dave Kehr,
Chicago Reader,
13 Dec 2006
fresh:
In this film the scenery is lovely and only the human race is vile.
– Robert J. Landry,
Variety,
30 Jan 2008
fresh:
Midnight Cowboy's peep-show vision of Manhattan lowlife may no longer be shocking, but what is shocking, in 1994, is to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.
– Owen Gleiberman,
Entertainment Weekly,
7 Sep 2011
fresh:
I cannot recall a more marvelous pair of acting performances in any one film.
– Gene Siskel,
Chicago Tribune,
18 Jan 2013
fresh:
Midnight Cowboy moves beyond realism into an archetypal tale of the Big City destroying dreamers. Joe and Ratso, like Of Mice and Men's George and Lenny, are quintessential failed, lower-class, buddy-dreamers.