Taxi Driver

"You talkin' to me?" Martin Scorsese's searing portrait of loneliness and violence on the mean streets of New York remains one of the quintessential films of 1970s American cinema, a brooding blast of modern gothic cinema that boils over in madness and self-destruction. Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, the insomniac taxi driver of the title who slips into violence in his nocturnal prowlings, is like a pressure cooker of alienated desperation and rage who channels his frustrations into plotting the assassination of a political figure and then saving a teenage hooker (Jodie Foster) from her pimp (Harvey Keitel). Screenwriter Paul Schrader reportedly poured out the screenplay while suffering from his own identity crisis. Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks and Peter Boyle co-star. The new two-disc edition features two new commentary tracks (one from film professor and writer Robert Kolker, the other from Schrader) and a collection of new featurettes, including the 15-minute "Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver" (talking about his influences and his reflections on the work decades later) and the 21-minute "God's Lonely Man" (reflections by Schrader and Kolker), along with shorter companion featurettes. Also features the excellent and comprehensive 70-minute documentary "Making Taxi Driver" (produced in 1999), storyboard-to-film comparisons (with an introduction by Scorsese), and an interactive screenplay among the supplements.