Taxi Driver

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss. Read full review

Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don’t need to be in the know to relish Scorsese’s mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are. Read full review

Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed. [35th Anniversary Release] Read full review

Scorsese's seductive, dreamlike imagery and Schrader's voiceover narration draw the audience into Bickle's head and reveal the world through his eyes, which see only ugliness and filth. Read full review

The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong.... This utter aloneness is at the center of Taxi Driver, one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it. [20th Anniversary Release] Read full review

It’s a powerful film, an excellent credit for Scorsese, and a terrific showcase for the versatility of star Robert De Niro. Read full review

A brilliant nightmare and like all nightmares it doesn't tell us half of what we want to know. Read full review

One of Scorsese's most influential and disturbing films on the big screen. [20th Anniversary Release] Read full review

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept Taxi Driver fresh all these years. [20th Anniversary Release] Read full review

An undeniably brilliant, nightmarish portrait of one man's personal hell. Read full review

You either love it or you love it; in any case, Martin Scorsese's history-making scald is truly a phenomenon from another day and age. Read full review

It hasn't aged so much as triumphantly metastasized. [20th Anniversary Release] Read full review

Forty years on, Taxi Driver remains almost impossibly perfect: it’s hard to think of another film that creates and sustains such a unique, evocative tone, of dread blended with pity, loathing, savage humour and a scuzzy edge of New York cool. Read full review

Watch this 4K restoration of Scorsese’s ’76 masterpiece, its colours a seeping virus, and marvel that he originally planned to shoot on black-and-white video. Read full review

This is a wholly remarkable film, flaws and all. In fact, even the flaws are significant. Read full review

The blend of Schrader's script, Scorsese's direction and De Niro's performance is both riveting and unnerving. A film that will stay with you forever. Read full review

What a mad and brilliant film it is: 1,000-degree proof Seventies cinema. [30th Anniversary Release] Read full review

Taxi Driver is a disturbing, frightening film, but it has the desperate excitement that goes with its vision of the city. Scorsese's verminous New York is a descendant of Baudelaire's "anthill" Paris, Eliot's "unreal" London, the nightmare Berlin of such German films as Fritz Lang's "M." In this vision the great modern city is the crossroads where fenced-off forces break loose and collide. The overworld and the underworld embrace each other in a dance of mutual lusts that can only lead to violence. [1 Mar 1976, p.82]

The fact that we experience Travis’s need for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the quality of consummation, makes Taxi Driver one of the few truly modern horror films. Read full review

What finally makes the movie so compelling is director Martin Scorsese's scathing vision of New York as a fiery inferno of neon lights and relentlessly hostile populace. Read full review

Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak. Read full review

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese. Read full review

The movie has an air of recent discovery, of shocked innocence about the tawdry quality of city life that is gratingly naive. The film goes most disastrously wrong when it tries to turn slice-of-life realism into full-scale melodrama. Read full review