Taxi Driver
An insomniac Vietnam vet becomes a New York City cab driver, slowly descending into violent fantasy as he fixates on a 12-year-old prostitute.
You talkin' to me? One of cinema's most iconic lines. Bernard Herrmann's last score. De Niro's career-defining performance.
NYC in 1975 had 1,622 murders. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. Scorsese captured the city's disintegration as moral horror.
The bomb, the Red Menace, and the space race turbocharged science fiction. Giant ants, alien invasions, and body-snatchers were all metaphors for communist infiltration or nuclear dread.
Sputnik shock accelerated public fascination with space. From The Fly to 2001, cinema processed the question: what lies beyond our world?
Unlike WWII films, Vietnam cinema was fractured and critical. The war appeared first in coded form (Apocalypse Now's development started in 1969), then explicitly in The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July.
The women's movement slowly opened cinema to female perspectives. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975), the rise of the 'strong female lead' in the 80s, and the gradual dismantling of the male gaze.