Film Forum

(1976) Robert De Niro’s insomniac cabbie Travis Bickle transforms himself into a mohawked, armed-to-the-teeth avenging angel, meeting his own judgment day in the form of child hooker Jodie Foster and her pimp Harvey Keitel. Shot during a sweltering NYC summer-cum-garbage strike. 35mm. Approx. 113 min.

Reviews

“Few film captured the squalor of that era more viscerally… The portrait of Times Square as a hotbed of porno theaters, junkies, and prostitutes is a jarring contrast to the scrubbed-down, Disney-fied version of today.”
– Jason Bailey, Flavorwire

“A BRILLIANT NIGHTMARE.”
– Rober Ebert

“FEROCIOUSLY POWERFUL… The whole movie has a sense of vertigo.”
– Pauline Kael

“Taxi Driver 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.”
– The Village Voice

“Martin Scorsese’s unflinching plunge into the darkest recesses of the human soul feels painfully relevant.”
– Time Out

“Like Werner Herzog’s Aguirre or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver is auteurist psychodrama… Certainly no one connected with Taxi Driver ever again reached such heights (or plumbed such depths).”
– J. Hoberman