Director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s masterpiece about watchful, haunted cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) and his descent into humiliation, vengeance and madness is a stylised nightmare that toys with our empathy. It places us firmly in the mind of its protagonist – “God’s lonely man” – and lets us glide with him through the colourful, sinful streets of New York, at a time when the city was falling apart. We find ourselves sharing his outrage, his longing, his sense of injustice. But then the filmmakers turn the tables on us, by letting him unravel before our eyes. The American cinema of the 1970s is often revered for its grit, but Taxi Driver, for all the grime and misery on display, is more dreamlike. Michael Chapman’s lush cinematography and Bernard Herrmann’s alternately thundering and jazzy score create not immediacy, but an odd form of reverie: we are simultaneously immersed in Travis’s world and somehow also distanced from it. Is this what it feels like to go insane? – Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine (Credit: Sony Pictures)