Taxi Driver (1976)

Martin Scorsese's masterpiece resonates powerfully even today, thirty years after its release, with its story of a war veteran taxi driver, a kind of grown-up Holden Caulfield, who over the course of on-the-job transactional exchanges with psychos, pimps, politicians and prostitutes grows increasingly alienated from and disdainful of NYC - it is hard to argue with De Niro's taxi driver, Travis Bickle's perception that this 1970s NYC is perverted, immoral, sick but it is the taxi driver who psychotically reacts to it.

★★★★★

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The Lady Vanishes (1979)

This 1979 Hammer Films remake of the 1938 Hitchcock classic is an unnecessary film greatly inferior to the original but it is camp fun with Cybill Shepherd cast perfectly as the badly behaved heroine who discovers a fellow trans-European train passenger, Miss Froy, has mysteriously disappeared - or perhaps she was never on board at all.

★★★☆☆

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