Release Year: 1976

Genre: Crime, Drama

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul Schrader

Stars: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd

If you want a case of the warm fuzzies, watch It's A Wonderful Life. If you want to see New York City at its finest, check out Ghostbusters. If you want to see an awesome movie about great cabbies being excellent people, peep Jim Jarmusch's Night On Earth.

But if you feel like going into the small intestine of the seedy underbelly of NYC and watching a man spiral into madness—or hey, if you want to check out what is deemed by directors worldwide to be one of the Top 10 Best Movies Ever Made—Taxi Driver is for you.

Taxi Driver is the tale of how a lonely cabbie befriends a young prostitute and helps her reunite with her abandoned parents… by going on a bloody, psychotic rampage, and blowing away the young girl's pimp and a bunch of hotel employees. 

It's violent, it's dark, it's counter-intuitive—and it's a universally acknowledged classic.

Taxi Driver arrived at a time (1976) when New York City was at its sleaziest and grittiest. It was in the middle of a crime wave. It was in the middle of a recession. It was in the middle of a garbage strike—yum, hot trash juice cooking in the mid-Atlantic summer sun. Times Square was a festering sore full of porno theaters, porno shops, and (porno?) drugs.

Given the desperate conditions in the city, it wasn't too hard for screenwriter Paul Schrader to draw on his own feelings of isolation, concocting the tale of a lonely taxi driver who gradually loses his marbles and decides to pursue a course of vigilante violence. Paired with the vision of a young director named Martin Scorsese (who would go on to direct more masterpieces, like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed) Taxi Driver became an insta-classic.

The theme hit America—and the world—at the right time. It reverberated enough to win Taxi Driver the 1976 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, probably the most prestigious award in international cinema. At home, the movie didn't do quite as well at the Oscars: this "feel-bad" movie lost to the feel-good Rocky. It still managed to rack up four nominations, though (and competition was pretty steep that year: All the President's Men and Network were also nominated).

In the succeeding years, the movie's reputation has grown and grown: Quentin Tarantino called it the greatest "first person" study of a character in the history of movies, and it's rightfully included on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.

Taxi Driver might not be exactly sweet 'n' cuddly, then, but its depiction of human loneliness and encroaching madness left a major imprint on the history of movies. 

We're guessing it'll leave a major imprint on your mind, too.

Because Taxi Driver asks pretty much all the tough questions, we'll do the same: 

Why should you watch this movie?

No, really? Why?

Why on earth, in this violence-ridden, topsy-turvy, maddening world, would you want to spend a few hours of your precious time watching one dude descend into insanity? Why, when your faith in humanity is hanging on by a thread, should you watch a film about a guy whose humanity is… pretty much null and void?

Why, when you've just now come to terms with the fact that, no matter how long you plead with the drive-through staff, nobody at McDonald's is going to make you a Shamrock Shake outside of the St. Patrick's Day season… would you want to take on additional pain?

The answer is up to you. 

We can't pretend to know how this film will resonate with you—but we can promise that it will. Watching Travis Bickle gradually go from fractured to straight-up broken, from demented to full-on crazytown, will haunt you forever.

Here are a few reasons why watching Travis' downward spiral, in such claustrophobic close proximity, might be important for you:

1. You might understand—in a more gut-seizingly immediate way—the famous R.E.M. statement that everybody hurts. After all, at the beginning of this screenplay for the movie, Paul Schrader included a quote from the author Thomas Wolfe:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Bleak? Oh yeah. Worth pondering? Abso-tootly.

2. You might learn, like poor Betsy, that some people are just flat-out creepy. Betsy first idealizes Travis—she thinks he's perhaps some sort of street prophet—before realizing that he's just plain wrong.

It's a depressing lesson, but Stranger Danger continues to be a real thing long after you've outgrown the phase when "Want some candy?" is the most enticing question in the world.

3. Maybe you have a taste for the most piquant satire, and will learn a thing or two from Scorsese's masterful portrayal of a psychopath lauded as a hero because he kills a pimp… rather than killing the presidential candidate he originally set his sights on.

4. Maybe, just maybe, you love literature and film and want to see one of the grittiest movies to come out of the grit pit that was American cinema in the 1970s. Maybe you love masterful lead performances. Maybe you love saturated color and jarring visuals. Maybe you want to take a crash course in How To Write An Intimate Portrayal Of A Madman.

Any way you cut it, if you love the immersive properties of the silver screen, you kind of need to watch Taxi Driver.

Go ahead and choose one of the options above as the reason you need to add Taxi Driver to your Netflix queue, or hey, make up your own. There are as many reasons to watch this Scorsese masterpiece as there are rats scurrying about the streets of Midtown Manhattan.

For good measure, though, we'll throw in a reason why you shouldn't watch Taxi Driver:

You shouldn't watch Taxi Driver if you think Travis is cool. If your idea of ultimate slickness is asking the mirror "You talkin' to me?" well, a) the mirror isn't speaking, and b) Travis Bickle is a deeply wounded, psychotic individual.

Hey, though—if you want an idol whose mind is warped, whose vision is a perpetual fever-dream, and whose actions rocked a nation and made him a hero, you should turn your admiring gaze to Martin Scorsese. Dude's a mad genius, and you only need to watch Taxi Driver to realize this.