Taxi Driver 1976

The synthesis of talents was extraordinary: Paul Schrader’s script surveys Manhattanthrough the eyes of an insomniac, sleaze-obsessed Vietnamvet and delineates his crackup with wily expertise. Bernard Herrmann’s score wails to wake the city’s dead. Scorsese pours a century of cinema into his vision of urban inferno – and Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle forever cruises the avenues of our imaginations, a psychopath as tender, lonely and deranged as Psycho’s Norman Bates, but so much more real. — BG

“What can be newly said about this savage, many-headed dragon of the American new wave? You either love it or you love it… Bickle remains an authentic everyman, a walking dumb-as-shit smashup of conservative responses, but also a disenfranchised victim of the corporate-imperial combine, an ex-soldier used to meaningless death, lost in the streets of his own empty freedom. There may not be a more essentially American figure haunting the national cinema.” — Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

“Taxi Driver still stuns! …Hysterical yet sublime, the movie crystallizes one of the worst moments in New York’s history – the city as America’s pariah, a crime-ridden, fiscally profligate, graffiti-festooned moral cesspool... In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognizably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners – not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion – all remain. Taxi Driver lives. See it again. And try to have a nice day.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice