A Truly Amazing And Remarkable Character Sketch.

Rating: 10/10 (31 December 2014)

This is Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese's best movie. Although Scorsese has done better pieces of film, this still surpasses them. De Niro does his best performance and was robbed of his Oscar win. Yes, his performance in better than Jake La Motta in Raging Bull. Raging Bull is Scorsese's best piece of film and De Niro's second best performance.
Taxi Driver is one of those movies that are almost biographical as they centre on just one person. Centring on just one person means the character and plot development are going to be very sharp and deep. This is about a former soldier scared from his experiences and gets a job in New York driving a taxi during nights for twelve hours. He falls in love with a girl named Betsy, but the relationship fails. As he keeps slipping into a world of isolation, depression and anxiety, he becomes determined to fix up the streets and make the world better. He plans to assassinate a Senator and save a child (Jodie Foster) from prostitution and her pimp (Harvey Keitel). We see exactly what is in the mind of De Niro as he grows more into a mentally unstable state. What's cool is, he becomes a hero in the process. The American Film Institute ranked Travis Bickle (De Niro) in their list of Top 50 Villains. I don't get why that is. He cleans up the streets and saves a child from prostitution.
This is the second best character study film in history, on after Citizen Kane.