A Martin Scorsese Classic Is The "Worst" Best Movie According To Rotten Tomatoes

Summary Taxi Driver, a Scorsese classic, is ranked as the worst film on Rotten Tomatoes' greatest movies list due to its low critics' score.

Despite this, Robert De Niro shines in his role as Travis Bickle, giving a powerful performance that still holds up today.

The film, a gritty portrayal of NYC, blazed the trail for New Hollywood, flipping the vigilante genre to showcase a disturbed antihero.

Rotten Tomatoes has named the 300 greatest movies ever made, and according to its stats, Martin Scorsese’s groundbreaking masterpiece Taxi Driver is the worst film on the list. The list is mostly made up of the usual suspects, from Casablanca to The Godfather to Schindler’s List. But it also includes some strange choices. The 400 Blows is ranked below Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Citizen Kane is ranked below Zootopia. This list names L.A. Confidential as the greatest film ever made (it’s a great little crime thriller, but it doesn’t usually get the top spot).

This list, dubbed “Rotten Tomatoes’ 300 Best Movies of All Time,” compiles a selection of films hand-picked as the very best by a merry band of Tomatometer-approved critics and Rotten Tomatoes users. From Alfred Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg, the works of all the great filmmakers have been recognized on this list. But one key statistic weirdly ranks one of Scorsese’s greatest movies as the worst entry on the list.

Related Taxi Driver: 10 Reasons Travis Bickle Is The Quintessential Antihero Robert De Niro gives one of his best all-time performances as Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Here is why the character is so iconic.

Taxi Driver Has The Worst Critics' Score On Rotten Tomatoes' Best Movie List

Taking the #284 spot, Scorsese’s 1976 neo-noir masterpiece Taxi Driver is ranked pretty low on Rotten Tomatoes’ list. And despite placing 16 spots above the bottom ranking, it’s technically named as the worst film on the list, because it has the lowest RT critics’ score out of all 300 selected movies. It has an 89% rating on the Tomatometer, which is a great score indicating near-universal acclaim, but it is lower than the scores of all the other movies on the list.

Taxi Driver Is Still One Of Martin Scorsese's Best Movies

It’s a little weird to see Air and The LEGO Movie being listed as better movies than Taxi Driver, because Taxi Driver is a landmark piece of filmmaking. In 1976, Taxi Driver blazed the trail for New Hollywood’s gritty reinvention of American cinema. It flipped the then-popular vigilante genre on its head by depicting its eponymous antihero as a disturbed mind, not a triumphant hero like Death Wish’s Paul Kersey. All these years later, Taxi Driver still holds up as one of Scorsese’s finest efforts.

Robert De Niro gives a deeply unsettling and profoundly vulnerable performance as Travis Bickle. Scorsese’s camera captures the ugly side of New York City – a lawless cesspool of crime and corruption – through moody B-roll and poignant visual symbolism. Taxi Driver deserves a spot in the top 10, not the bottom 20. It’s not the only Scorsese film on the list; his rapid-paced mob epic Goodfellas is ranked deservingly high up at #45, while his unflinchingly brutal boxing biopic Raging Bull is ranked even lower than Taxi Driver at #293, another case of RT’s flawed algorithm skewing the results.

Scorsese Movie RT % Goodfellas 95% The Irishman 95% Mean Streets 94% Hugo 93% Killers of the Flower Moon 93% Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 92% Raging Bull 92% The Departed 91% After Hours 90% Taxi Driver 89% The King of Comedy 89% The Age of Innocence 88% The Color of Money 88% The Aviator 87% Silence 83% The Last Temptation of Christ 82% The Wolf of Wall Street 80% Casino 78% Cape Fear 75% Kundun 74% Bringing Out the Dead 73% Gangs of New York 73% Who's That Knocking at My Door? 70% Shutter Island 69% New York, New York 57% Boxcar Bertha 54%

Source: Rotten Tomatoes