Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

As the west rapidly becomes civilized, a pair of outlaws in 1890s Wyoming find themselves pursued by a posse and decide to flee to South America in hopes of evading the law.

A genuine puzzle of a film: audiences embraced it as a classic almost immediately, but contemporary critics were far cooler, calling it slick and self-satisfied. The Newman-Redford chemistry won admirers, yet the episodic structure, the Burt Bacharach score, and the famous bicycle interlude divided reviewers sharply — some reading them as breezy charm, others as cynical shortcuts to sentiment. Decades of popular affection have widened the gap between the film's reputation and what critics actually wrote at the time.