The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
57. 1969 - Midnight Cowboy
Honourable Mentions: Army of Shadows, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider
John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy is possibly the definitive film of the American New Wave.
An X-rated picture about a pair of spiralling New York City hustlers (Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman) that won three Academy Awards (including best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay), Schleisinger's film encapsulated the unadulterated rawness of the New Hollywood in fierce, uncompromising fashion, with the British filmmaker taking the lessons from his own country's new wave and finding rich material by applying them to an American context.
Voight and Hoffman are magnetic - the latter delivering one of the most iconic quotes in movie history through an off-the-cuff interaction with a real New York cabbie - while Schlesinger's direction is characteristically unvarnished. A true great of the sixties, and one that shouldn't be missed.