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Quentin Tarantino has compared his next film, The Movie Critic, to Taxi Driver – but in the most unexpected way.
Little is known so far about the filmmaker's tenth outing, which will reportedly be his last. Though he has previously revealed that it'll be set predominantly in 1977, the year after the release of Martin Scorsese's aforementioned title. In a new interview with French publication Liberation, Tarantino described The Movie Critic's titular character as "Travis Bickle if he were a film critic," referencing Robert De Niro's infamous cabbie.
In Taxi Driver, Travis is a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran, who works as a New York City hackman. One day, he vows to save Iris (Jodie Foster), an underage prostitute from her pimp in an attempt to clean up the neighborhood. His efforts, rather unsurprisingly, end in bloodshed.
"One of the things about Taxi Driver [is] that it is just so magnificent," Tarantino gushed to Sky Movies back in 2021. "I actually do feel that it may be the greatest first-person character study ever committed to film. I mean, I really actually can't even think of a second, or a third or a fourth that can even come into contention with it.
"Scorsese, at this time of his career, had a connection to cinema and no matter how dark the material was, there was such an exuberance to filmmaking that I don't know if anyone will ever quite have the run of films that he had in the '70s leading into the '80s."
While Tarantino has since criticized Columbia Pictures for race-swapping the movie's villain as a "societal compromise" in his book Cinema Speculation, it's no wonder Taxi Driver has had such an influence over his final flick.
While we wait for more news on Tarantino's next project, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way in 2023 and beyond.
