Taxi Driver | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

The bonds are close and tight between Scorsese's first film and his most recent effort. And yet Taxi Driver stands alone. It is original, harrowing, instant American mythology.

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.

Scorsese has spit all his disgust right in our faces. Well, you don't have to like it. But when the doors of the [theater] opened to let us out, there was New York and I knew, I knew it was no longer possible to avoid the horror.

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.

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.