Midnight Cowboy - The Criterion Collection

Released: 18th January 2027. One of the British New Wave’s most versatile directors, John Schlesinger came to New York in the late 1960s to make Midnight Cowboy, a picaresque story of friendship that captured a city in crisis and sparked a new era of Hollywood movies. Jon Voight delivers a career-making performance as Joe Buck, a wide-eyed hustler from Texas hoping to score big with wealthy 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, played by Dustin Hoffman in a radical departure from his breakthrough in The Graduate. A critical and commercial success despite controversy over what the MPAA termed its “homosexual frame of reference,” Midnight Cowboy became the first X-rated film to receive the Best Picture Oscar, and decades on, its influence still reverberates through cinema.  4K UHD SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by cinematographer Adam Holender, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in HDR and one Blu-ray with the special features Audio commentary from 1991 featuring director John Schlesinger and producer Jerome Hellman Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of “Midnight Cowboy” (2022), a documentary by Nancy Buirski Video essay with commentary by Holender Photo gallery with commentary by photographer Michael Childers The Crowd Around the Cowboy, a 1969 short film made on location for Midnight Cowboy Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter’s Journey (1990), a documentary by Eugene Corr and Robert Hillmann Two short documentaries on the making and release of the film Interview from 1970 with actor Jon Voight on The David Frost Show Voight’s original screen test Interview from 2000 with Schlesinger for BAFTA Los Angeles Excerpts from the 2002 BAFTA Los Angeles tribute to Schlesinger Trailer English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by critic Mark Harris Cover by Jay Shaw