The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

57. 1969 - Midnight Cowboy

Midnight Cowboy
United Artists

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.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.