Metacritic reviews

A brilliant nightmare and like all nightmares it doesn't tell us half of what we want to know.

One of Scorsese's most influential and disturbing films on the big screen. [20th Anniversary Release]

Its deeply anarchic sensibility has kept Taxi Driver fresh all these years. [20th Anniversary Release]

An undeniably brilliant, nightmarish portrait of one man's personal hell.

You either love it or you love it; in any case, Martin Scorsese's history-making scald is truly a phenomenon from another day and age.

It hasn't aged so much as triumphantly metastasized. [20th Anniversary Release]

Scorsese’s direction always keeps us uncomfortably close to Travis’ subjectivity, whether we’re prowling night time Manhattan or gazing into a glass of Alka-Seltzer until the whole world disappears into the healing hiss.

Hitchcockian unease permeates the film, but so too does a Godardian use of space and a Bressonian focus on obsession heighten the mounting sense of dread. These elements are groovy for film buffs but are mere icing on the proverbial cake; you don’t need to be in the know to relish Scorsese’s mastery of the form, and what may astonish even more than the creative prowess is how compulsively entertaining the results are.

Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak.

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese.