Critically and commercially successful on release, it won 3 Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay – with it today remaining the only X-Rated film to ever win Best Picture.

Critical reviews for the film are largely positive, with major praise for its story, characters, performances and overall style and sensibility, with Vincent Canby writing in the New York Times’ 1969 review that it is a “moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place”, while Gene Siskel wrote in the Chicago Tribune that he could not “recall a more marvellous pair of acting performances in any one film” and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly was impressed “to see a major studio film linger this lovingly on characters who have nothing to offer the audience but their own lost souls.”

#36 in The American Film Institute’s 1998 list of 100 Greatest Films of All Time and #43 in their 2007 ranking.

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 89% with its critical consensus stating that “John Schlesinger’s gritty, unrelentingly bleak look at the seedy underbelly of urban American life is undeniably disturbing, but Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight’s performances make it difficult to turn away.”