Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
Taxi Driver is a landmark neo-noir character study, elevated by De Niro's career-defining performance as Travis Bickle and Bernard Herrmann's haunting score. Schrader's script is deeply interior and thematically rich — alienation, masculinity, urban decay — though the plot itself is deliberately thin and episodic by design. Scorsese and DP Michael Chapman craft an expressionistic, rain-slicked vision of 1970s New York that remains visually iconic. The film's conception and voice are utterly singular, fusing European art cinema sensibility with American genre filmmaking in a way no other film has replicated. The ending's ironic coda — Travis hailed as a hero — is provocative but somewhat abrupt, landing as mordant commentary rather than fully satisfying dramatic resolution.