IndieWire by Adam Solomons

Letting the movie do the talking often works best.

Washington Post by Mark Jenkins

Obliquely but evocatively, “Desperate Souls” ponders the many roles of the cowboy: gay icon, cinematic hero and symbol of American manifest destiny from the Rockies to the Mekong. Yet the documentary acknowledges that neither Schlesinger’s film nor its era could change everything.

The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg

“Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly.

The Film Stage by Logan Kenny

At best, Desperate Souls suggests a series of passionate stories being told by a beloved family member, occasionally sprawling but never anything less than compelling. By the end there’s a sense of sadness that its shaggy pleasures are now in the past, rendering its faults comparatively minor.

Wall Street Journal by Kyle Smith

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

RogerEbert.com by Charles Kirkland Jr.

The film takes only a moment to discuss the success of its source material. In fact, it is only at the end of the movie that "Desperate Souls" reveals that "Midnight Cowboy" won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Instead, the documentary spends too much time looking at the world around Schlesinger's drama.