Walk into the incredible true experience of Billy Hayes. And bring all the courage you can.
Overview
Billy Hayes is caught attempting to smuggle drugs out of a country. The courts decide to make an example of him, sentencing him to more than 30 years in prison. Hayes has two opportunities for release: the appeals made by his lawyer, his family, and the American government, or the "Midnight Express".
Ratings
Curator score: 5.5/10
IMDb: 7.5/10
Letterboxd: 3.72/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%
Metacritic: 59
TMDB: 7.4/10
Director
Alan Parker
Production
Columbia Pictures, Casablanca Filmworks
Cast
Brad Davis, Irene Miracle, Bo Hopkins, Paolo Bonacelli, Paul L. Smith, Randy Quaid, Norbert Weisser, John Hurt, Mike Kellin, Franco Diogene, Michael Ensign, Gigi Ballista, Kevork Malikyan, Peter Jeffrey, Joe Zammit Cordina, Yashaw Adem, Raad Rawi, Tony Boyd, Zannino, Mihalis Giannatos
Where to watch
fuboTV
Curator Review
Verdict
A tense, bleak prison drama with strong craft, a memorable score, and a punishing sense of escalation, but it’s also dated in its politics and depiction of Turkey, which can seriously affect the viewing experience. Worth it if you want a hard-edged 70s survival story and can separate the film’s formal power from its ugly blind spots.
Best for
fans of grim prison dramas
viewers interested in 1970s prestige thrillers
people who like intense, claustrophobic survival stories
audiences drawn to escape-and-endurance narratives
Skip if
you’re sensitive to racist or xenophobic portrayals
you want a balanced or historically nuanced true-story adaptation
you prefer hopeful or emotionally warm prison films
you dislike bleak, punishing cinema
Overview
Midnight Express is built like a pressure cooker. Alan Parker turns Billy Hayes’s ordeal into a relentless descent through panic, humiliation, and institutional cruelty, and the film’s formal control is often impressive: the opening smuggling sequence is a masterclass in suspense, and Giorgio Moroder’s score gives the whole thing a feverish pulse.
Worth noting
Brad Davis anchors the film with a physical, increasingly desperate performance that makes the prison scenes feel almost unbearable. The movie’s reputation as a hard, effective prison classic is well earned on a craft level, especially in how it stages confinement, breakdown, and the fantasy of escape.
Bottom line
But the film is also deeply compromised by its politics and its portrayal of Turkish people and institutions, which many viewers now find reductive and inflammatory. That doesn’t erase its cinematic force, but it does mean the film plays less like a clean triumph of justice than a very 1970s mix of outrage, sensationalism, and exploitation-adjacent grit.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Tom Spearing (2★) · 549 likes
So here’s another widely respected classic that seems more than a little problematic to me. There’s much here that I really liked—the intro airport sequence is brilliantly put together: following our protagonist Billy Hayes as he attempts to smuggle 2kg of hashish out of Turkey; sweat beading down his forehead, heartbeat audibly thudding in his chest, trying his best to allay suspicion as he makes his way tentatively through customs. It’s a super tense and slickly orchestrated sequence that hooks… more So here’s another widely respected classic that seems more than a little problematic to me. There’s much here that I really liked—the intro airport sequence is brilliantly put together: following our protagonist Billy Hayes as he attempts to smuggle 2kg of hashish out of Turkey; sweat beading down his forehead, heartbeat audibly thudding in his chest, trying his best to allay suspicion as he makes his way tentatively through customs. It’s a super tense and slickly orchestrated sequence that hooks… more
Cole Duffy (2★) · 434 likes
So let me get this straight: a callow American student was caught smuggling drugs out of Turkey, was arrested, imprisoned, and later escaped. After all this, he wrote a book about his experiences which was then turned into a movie that made up a lot of bullshit and vilified the Turks beyond any levels of believable credibility?
Billy Hayes (the student) and Oliver Stone (the writer) have both apologized for the hateful and downright reckless portrayals of all the Turkish… more
Quintin (3★) · 319 likes
I love how I thought this movie was going to be about trains because of the title and then 30 minutes into the film they say idiots think Midnight Express means a train.
Wasn't expected to get absolutely roasted by a film.
king Joe (4★) · 305 likes
Man tried to lick a tit behind glass
chavel (4★) · 278 likes
Midnight Express has been perceived through the years as either a 70’s prison movie classic or as an overcooked melodrama of injustice. Pleeeassse, it's the former. The film, directed by Alan Parker and penned by first-time screenwriter Oliver Stone, caused quite a stir at its 1978 Cannes Film Festival premiere but divided critics. The studio continued to lack faith in its box office potential due to its harsh themes and almost demanded a very commercialized adventure ending (that was discarded),… more Midnight Express has been perceived through the years as either a 70’s prison movie classic or as an overcooked melodrama of injustice. Pleeeassse, it's the former. The film, directed by Alan Parker and penned by first-time screenwriter Oliver Stone, caused quite a stir at its 1978 Cannes Film Festival premiere but divided critics. The studio continued to lack faith in its box office potential due to its harsh themes and almost demanded a very commercialized adventure ending (that was discarded),… more
A harsher confinement story about how institutions distort behavior and identity.
Topics
prison drama, 1970s cinema, bleak tone, survival, escape, institutional violence, based on a memoir, psychological pressure, political controversy, prestige thriller