A Grounded Masterpiece From The '70s.

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2018)

Taxi Driver is one of my favourite movies: it's Martin Scorsese's finest piece of work and this film further consolidated Robert De Niro's acting skills outside of The Godfather Part II; this guy didn't need an ensemble cast of gangsters in this movie to show that Travis Bickle is a truly traumatized war-vet attempting to fit in 1970s New York. De Niro is truly in a class of his own in this movie, which portrays loneliness in a way few movies can capture. It's a sad but excruciatingly well-done neo-noir thriller that gave us the big-screen career breakthrough of Jodie Foster, playing Iris, an under-age hooker.
Taxi Driver is now over forty years old, and it's widely cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and I absolutely understand why. This is a story that relates to outsiders: not just in the broad Western-country sense, but in a universal sense. Travis tries his best to fit in, but he's only really accepted when he's behind the wheel, transporting the city's filth. He tries to impress a girl and he just doesn't get what makes for acceptable means of social interaction (like taking his date to the porn theater). We see New York through Travis' eyes and it basically all washes over him until he bumps into Iris, and finds out about her 'job'. He won't have anymore of that so he decides to try and help her.
Need I say anymore about Taxi Driver? It's a neo-noir masterpiece that's managed to transcend space and time in the cinematic medium, comparable to other masterpieces in generations gone by like Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, Star Wars, Back to the Future and Pulp Fiction. Taxi Driver is the equivalent of Holy Texts in cinema; it's that masterful and it's that good a watch.
If you're one of those film buffs that's missed out on this movie somehow, just give it a watch. This is film history at its absolute finest.