My Name Is Henry Krinkle: The 10 Best Films Of The Seventies

2. Taxi Driver (1976) (Dir. Martin Scorsese)

Taxi Driver is a true movie-lover’s movie: Martin Scorsese’s brilliant meditation on loneliness, insanity and alienation is one of the all-time great films, a motion picture that balances small tender dramatic moments and sudden explosions of rage and violence with an enviable precision. As Travis Bickle, DeNiro embodies one of cinema’s most iconic characters, a former Vietnam veteran who returns to New York, suffers from insomnia and keeps himself going through working a never-ending taxi shift. Everything from Scorsese’s skilled use of his camera, DeNiro’s nuanced performance, and Bernard Herrmann’s noir-inspired score, sit perfectly: truly, there’s not a moment of Taxi Driver that doesn’t match up. Though it aches to be studied and examined as a defining work of seventies cinematic endeavor, Taxi Driver is near unmatched from a basic entertainment perspective. Here’s a movie with all the cogs working in perfect synchronization, something that Scorsese would come to achieve several more times over the course of his great career.