film

Martin Scorsese’s brilliant 1976 neo-noir classic Taxi Driver follows Travis Bickle, a troubled Vietnam veteran who takes a job working the night shift behind the wheel of a cab, prowling through a grimy, sleepless, post-Vietnam New York fantasising about cleaning up the city. Alienated from the people around him and increasingly disgusted by what he sees on the streets, this obsession gradually mutates into something far more dangerous.

Robert De Niro gives one of the defining performances of his career, and Travis is unsettling, pathetic and horribly compelling all at once. Jodie Foster plays a young sex worker whom he becomes determined to rescue, and Cybil Shepherd plays Betsy, a political campaign worker who he becomes fixated on, her rejection of him unwittingly deepening his dangerous isolation.