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| Robert De Niro |
Nowadays, it's easy to think of director Martin Scorsese as a visionary whose every film and every lecture and interview are worthy of dissection. However, it's harder to remember a time when he wasn't the king of gritty New York dramas where faith and violence were battling themes. Even then, there was a time when it didn't even look like he would make it out of the 70's. With a drug addiction to his credit and a screenplay by an equally depressed writer named Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is the ultimate homage to loneliness and delusion in a New York that has since been gussied up. The film is a time capsule of 70's cynicism as well as featuring one of the most breathtaking performances of Robert De Niro's career as Travis Bickle: a Vietnam War veteran who drives to escape his sleeping problems. The times may have changed, but the impact of Taxi Driver remains just as immediate as it did 40 years ago.
