Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is a disturbed ex-Marine Vietnam vet. He's suffering from insomnia, and spends his nights driving a cab. He's sexually perverted, and obsessed with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd). On top of it all, he wants to save 12 year old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster).

DeNiro delivered one of the iconic performances of all times. Travis Bickle is one of the standards by which all performances are judged. Martin Scorsese is making a disturbing movie. It can be hard to watch at times. Scorsese uses his camera to maximum effect. As Bickle's mind drift from his co-workers, Scorsese's camera drift into the antacid fizzling in his glass. The grittiness of '70s NY is all there. Jodie Foster is shocking. Trying to watch Bickle can be a very trying experience. It isn't an easy movie. But it is a masterpiece.

Insomniac Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes a job driving a New York taxi cab, becomes obsessed with beautiful political campaigner Betsy (Cybill Shepherd),who gives him the cold shoulder after he tries to take her to a skin flick on a date. Bickle then becomes obsessed with underage hooker Iris (Jodie Foster),buys lots of guns, and goes trigger happy on her pimp (Harvey Keitel).

As a fan of gritty 70s movie-making, I find it hard to believe that, until now, I hadn't seen Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver; I think perhaps the problem was that, having heard so many good things about the film, I didn't want to risk disappointment. Unfortunately, that's precisely what I felt when I finally got around to watching the film.

It's not that it's a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination—on the contrary, it's a skilfully assembled character study of a self-destructive loose cannon that boasts excellent cinematography, great music, and superb performances—BUT in the end it just didn't grab me as much as I would have liked. The story progresses very slowly, which in itself isn't a massive issue for me, but the payoff simply isn't as satisfying as I felt it needed to be given all that has gone before.

After all of his stalking, inane rambling and meticulous planning, Travis Bickle's rampage is over in a flash, after which he is proclaimed a hero and freed to roam the streets once more (unless you prescribe to the theory that everything after the shootout is in Bickle's mind as he slowly bleeds to death). Perhaps Scorsese's point was to show us just how easy it is for a dangerous loony like Bickle to be overlooked by society until its too late—but it sure felt like a letdown to me.

6.5 out of 10, rounded up to 7 for Keitel's hair.

Quite rightly regarded as one of the best films of all time, TAXI DRIVER is without a doubt compelling viewing. What the film lacks in plot it makes up for in characterisation: De Niro is with us from the start, we follow on his journey as he slides into extreme violence and becomes a vigilante. Although it's obvious that this man is disturbed from the very beginning - a man who considers pornography to be "just another movie", who is always at breaking point. You can't really blame him though. After all, his empty life is forever surrounded by people who don't deserve to live, who don't deserve to populate this planet, and nobody is doing anything about it. It's up to Bickle to do the dirty work himself. He is the new rain coming down on the streets to clear away all the garbage.

Just about everyone involved here is extremely lucky in not putting a foot wrong. Martin Scorsese basks in his finest hour, even later classics like GOODFELLAS just can't hold a candle to match the intensity and complexity of this film. Check out the clever cameo where he plays a passenger spying on his cheating wife. The film focuses on De Niro's character, meaning that a lot of other roles are underwritten; Cybill Shepherd appears only fleetingly as a kind of idealistic fantasy figure. Jodie Foster excels as a child prostitute, hard and yet fragile at the same time, and Harvey Keitel is suitably slimy as a no-good pimp. In small roles are Peter Boyle and Joe Spinell. However it's De Niro who commands the screen, this is his film, we see things through his eyes. I don't think his quiet, brooding darkness here has ever been matched.

There are countless moments to enjoy. Bickle talking to a 'secret service' man, a deliciously pleasant conversation full of deceit and lies; the infamous ad-libbed sequence in front of the mirror, where "You talking' to me?" became a classic movie quote; the almost tragic conversations with Iris. The ending itself is a shock, a total bloodbath made all the more horrific because the violence has been relatively tame up to then. Only three people are killed, but each shot and stabbed a number of times; fingers a blown off, necks spray blood, faces riddled with holes, heads splattering over walls. And then the ironic ending, where Bickle is revered as a hero instead of a cold-blooded killer; a more telling portrait of today's society there couldn't be. For a study of the reasons a person is driven to extreme violence, you couldn't do much better than this.