Please note: This was screened in
Fifty years after it picked up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Scorsese’s chilling masterpiece has lost none of its power to shock and disturb in its visceral exploration of alienation and violence in urban America.
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works night shifts in his taxi through districts of a ravaged New York where most cabbies refuse to go. Whilst doing so, he crosses paths with damaged characters and slides into a dangerous violent morality.
As a key filmmaking figure of the period, Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader could have filled a strand of films titled ‘Rogue Hollywood’ all on his own. Taxi Driver, like Hardcore (also screening in the season), explores the destructive traits of an obsessive masculinity. Here combined with Martin Scorsese’s kinetic direction and sympathy for subject matter and New York setting, Taxi Driver is a chilling masterpiece that has lost none of its power to shock and disturb in its visceral exploration of alienation and violence in urban America.