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AFI (1998) • AFI-047

Taxi Driver

1976 • Martin Scorsese
Taxi Driver poster
AVAILABLE EDITIONS
ABOUT THIS FILM
RUNTIME
113 min
FAMOUS QUOTE
“You talkin' to me?”

Martin Scorsese’s gritty character study follows Travis Bickle, a lonely Vietnam veteran drifting through the nocturnal streets of a decaying New York City as a taxi driver. Alienated from the people around him and repulsed by the urban corruption he believes surrounds him, Travis grows increasingly consumed by paranoia, resentment, and the fantasy of violent purification. Robert De Niro’s haunting performance captures both the character’s blank detachment and his mounting instability, while Scorsese’s direction immerses the viewer in a city of neon, steam, and psychic dislocation. Disturbing, hypnotic, and deeply influential, Taxi Driver remains one of American cinema’s most powerful portraits of loneliness, obsession, and alienation.

Why it matters

  • Taxi Driver became one of the defining films of the New Hollywood era, turning urban decay, post-Vietnam disillusionment, and masculine alienation into an unforgettable psychological portrait.
  • Paul Schrader’s script and Scorsese’s direction reshaped the character study into something both intimate and socially corrosive, influencing decades of films about obsession and instability.
  • Robert De Niro’s performance as Travis Bickle created one of the most iconic and unsettling antiheroes in American cinema, leaving a lasting mark on film culture and popular imagination.

Watch for

  • Scorsese’s use of rain-slick streets, drifting camera movement, and Bernard Herrmann’s score to turn New York into both a real city and a feverish mental landscape.
  • De Niro’s performance, especially the way Travis’s stiffness, silences, and sudden bursts of intensity reveal a mind gradually coming apart.
  • How the film traps the viewer inside Travis’s perspective, making his distorted view of the world both compelling and deeply unsettling.
  • The famous mirror scene and the violent final act, where performance, editing, and point of view push the film from alienation into nightmare.

Vibe

Psychological DramaUrban AlienationNocturnal New YorkViolence & ObsessionLonely VigilantePost-Vietnam MalaiseDisturbed MasculinityMoral DecayStreet-Level NightmareModern Noir
AFI RANK
1998: #47
2007: #52
▼Moved down 5 spots