Quentin Tarantino's Favorite 'Character Study Ever' Is Officially Streaming

Having influenced acclaimed movies such as Drive, Nightcrawler, and Joker, a neo-noir classic directed by Martin Scorsese remains as memorable as ever. The movie was recently added to a free streaming platform's library, giving a new generation of audiences the chance to check it out. The film put Scorsese on the map and turned Robert De Niro into a movie star. They went on to work together on half a dozen classics, the latest being the Oscar-nominated true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon.

De Niro also played a key supporting role in Joker, which was originally supposed to be produced by Scorsese. Joker divided audiences, who likened it to Scorsese's The King of Comedy, but earned a major fan in Quentin Tarantino. This makes sense, given how much Tarantino admires Scorsese's second collaboration with Robert De Niro, after 1973's Mean Streets.

Released in 1976, the film was written by Paul Schrader. It also featured Harvey Keitel — who worked with Tarantino on Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs — alongside Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, and Albert Brooks. The movie now holds a "Certified Fresh" 89% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, and is regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time and a towering achievement of the New Hollywood movement.

Here's Where You Can Watch the Neo-Noir Classic for Free

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We're talking, of course, about Taxi Driver. Now ranked 143rd on IMDb's list of the top 250 movies of all time, Taxi Driver follows a lonely man (De Niro) who prowls the streets of New York and turns into a vigilante after witnessing a young girl (Foster) being preyed upon. Produced on a reported budget of less than $2 million, the movie made around $30 million at the box office and caused an uproar over its violence.

Scorsese famously clashed with the studio over the graphic content, and had to make changes to the final sequence to avoid an X rating. Taxi Driver remains etched in infamy for having influenced criminals and for producing one of the most memorable quotes in film history: "You talkin' to me?" In his non-fiction book "Cinema Speculation," Tarantino called it "the greatest first-person character study ever committed to film."