It works its strange alchemy with riveting force… With this extraordinary film, Scorsese confirms his standing among our finest young directors. It is, among other things, a testament to the versatility that last produced Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

| Oct 6, 2023

Taxi Driver is so volatile it nearly explodes from the screen. Under Martin Scorsese's brilliant direction, it works a dramatic tension that is inescapable, carefully, systematically straitjacketing its audience in the problems of its central character.

| Oct 6, 2023

Remove the cataclysmic ending from Taxi Driver and it would be one smashingly good motion picture. As it stands, the film is beautiful to look at, exciting to listen to, but much too much to stomach.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 6, 2023

Whatever else anybody comes to think about Taxi Driver, it has a muscle-tensing, skin-prickling, apprehensive suspense that builds from those first unsettling moments like an air-raid siren.

| Oct 6, 2023

All these things might be reconciled and resolved, if only the film probed deeper instead of trying merely to astonish and dazzle. Obviously, it is the offspring of an unholy union.

| Oct 6, 2023

Like any genuine nightmare, Taxi Driver induces terror because its hideousness grows out of pure, if awful, human truth.

| Oct 6, 2023

Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman create a funky, overripe New York that's like a nightmare Travis can never stop dreaming... But first and last Taxi Driver belongs to Robert De Niro, the most remarkable young actor of the American screen.

| Oct 6, 2023

Even if [the actors] were all better -- and part of the picture's trouble is that there is no way for them to be much better -- Taxi Driver would still be no more than the 1976 dark-mirror image of 1936 romance.

| Oct 6, 2023

Taxi Driver is a fascinating film. It is strong and moving, and it often affects the emotions like a blow to the stomach. It is not for the squeamish, but it is one superior piece of motion picture artistry.

| Oct 6, 2023

Whether it is a doomsday masterpiece or an exploitative ripoff of national paranoia, or both, as I believe, be forewarned that Taxi Driver has a hard R rating and is definitely not suitable for the squeamish.

| Oct 6, 2023

Scorsese is obviously talented. He knows how to build mood, tension and atmosphere... But he's short on coherence where it matters most. His films are beginning to look like they've been made by a promising upstart who believes his own press clippings.

| Oct 6, 2023

So sure, there are lonely people out there -- but Taxi Driver fails to offer an imitable solution to lone wolfishness. The outcome is about as senseless as the director's closeup of a glass of fizzy Alka-Seltzer.

| Oct 6, 2023

I didn't mind the sordidness, the violence, or the mock-ironic ending. What I did mind about the film was its life-denying spirit, its complete lack of curiosity about the possibilities of people.

| Oct 6, 2023

It is an ugly story, filled with tension and an ambiguity that borders disturbingly on emptiness.

| Oct 6, 2023

De Niro's work as the 26-year-old ex-Marine who takes the night shift behind the wheel because he can't sleep anyway will surely be remembered as one of the most effective screen characterizations of our time.

| Oct 6, 2023

The problem is that there is no meat, no meaning, no message. No matter how deliciously and explicitly Scorsese fondles Bickle's manifestations of madness and his sickening final rampage of cleansing carnage, the symbolism is devoid of content and point.

| Oct 6, 2023

Taxi Driver is artistic without being self-consciously artsy. One of the reasons why is that it is superbly photographed, and edited in fluid tandem with brassy, jazzy background music.

| Oct 6, 2023

It is a wonderful performance by De Niro, permitting us to see, apparently by intermittent flashes, into this ignorant, inarticulate and secret man as his personality disintegrates under stress.

| Oct 6, 2023

Marvelously cryptic, with first-rate acting by Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster.

| Oct 6, 2023

At a time when law and order has its own psychotic defenders, the ironical moral seems to be that irrational vengeance is hard to distinguish from it.

| Oct 6, 2023