Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

Audience Reviews

View All (7)

Cee C Engaging doc that explores in depth. It's not redundant or dumbed down, it takes on interesting concepts - like the creative struggle of filmmakers, in an intimate way. A must see for lovers of cinema and NYC history!!! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 10/20/23 Full Review Nat S Really fascinating and entertaining doc. Loved it. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 09/27/23 Full Review dave d Well that Jon Voight interview went well. Unfocused and meandering into social issues and too all over the map. Good in segments, but too hard to contain. Final Score: 4.2/10 Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 09/22/23 Full Review Marilyn H This felt like a draft of a film, not a film. I loved Midnight Cowboy and have seen it many times. I know Buirski's desire was to honor the film and to explore that moment in time. I wish she had done that, but she did neither. The film is confusing and redundant, it kept covering topics, moving on, and then, for some unknown reason, circling back to them. There were about 6 different endings. I read somewhere that she walked into the edit room without a script or an outline and that her films came out of conversations she had with her editor. That may have been a good method for her other films, but not for this one. It is simply unkempt. Apparently neither her editor nor her producers seemed to be able to tell her that the Empress had no clothes. I had great hopes for this film, Buirski's final one as she recently passed away. If you want to see something that she did really well, see "The Loving Story." Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 09/15/23 Full Review Brent M It's unfortunate when a filmmaker sets out to pay tribute to a cinematic classic yet somehow manages to mangle the effort, but, regrettably, that's precisely what happened in writer-director Nancy Buirski's attempted homage to John Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" (1969), the only X-rated release ever to win the Oscar for best picture. The scattered narrative of this poorly constructed documentary seems to focus on virtually everything except the film itself, drawing upon an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to explaining what influenced this screen epic rather than what went into the making of the picture itself. While it's certainly enlightening and helpful to provide viewers with sufficient back story about the timing of a movie's production and the filmmaking influences that helped shape it, these practices nevertheless become a burdensome distraction when they dominate the documentary's content and overshadow what made its supposed subject matter so noteworthy in the first place. As a consequence, the flow of this offering is about as unwieldy as its title, jumping around from ancillary subject to ancillary subject and often providing only the most tangential connections to its alleged core material. Granted, there are a few moderately interesting anecdotes here and there, as well as a few insightful references to how "Midnight Cowboy" went on to influence a number of subsequent film productions. But even the contemporary and archive interviews with director John Schlesinger, screenwriters Waldo Salt and James Leo Herlihy, and cast members Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Brenda Vaccaro, Jennifer Salt and Bob Balaban shed little meaningful new light on this highly regarded offering. Perhaps the biggest problem here is that the underlying story of this documentary turned out to be inherently thinner than the filmmaker thought it was and that she chose to pad the material to artificially extend its length (although coming up with an entirely different narrative or editing the current one down to a film short would have made better options). It's too bad this one fared as it has, as it's a release that I truly looked forward to screening. It's indeed one thing to establish a story in the context of its times and influences and to do it correctly (as was very much the case, for example, with the David Bowie documentary "Moonage Daydream" (2022)), but this offering, sadly, is a prime example of how not to do it. "Midnight Cowboy" certainly deserved better than this, and one's time would definitely be better spent watching the original than this failed attempt at honoring it. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 09/08/23 Full Review Jeronimo J QUIERO QUE BAJE EL 100% LISTO XD Rated 0.5/5 Stars •  Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 07/12/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy

My Rating

Read More Read Less POST RATING WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW

Most Popular at Home Now