Ten Films by De Niro
By Joe Boden
26th June 2009

Intro l 10-6 l 5-1

The biggest and most difficult question to answer in film is which Robert de Niro performance is the best. Of course, with most actors you’ll get differing opinions on their best film, but I’d say that De Niro has as many great performances – if not more – than any other actor in the history of cinema. He’s the favourite performer of just about anybody who is just getting into film, and – although he’s gone off the rails a little bit with the endless list of pointless, juvenile comedies and sub-par crime thrillers that he’s released in the past decade or so, if you just look at his stretch of films in the 70s and 80s, it’s easy to remind yourself why he is so well renowned as he is.

Choosing just one film to give an impression of this man’s career is impossible, so I’ve chosen to choose ten instead. This may seem a bit of a copout, but I’m going to rank them. This way, I get to choose my favourite performance yet still give a long list of honourable mentions. But even with a large (arbitrary) number of ten films, there are still plenty that you have to leave out. Maybe a list is the wrong way about respecting and chronicling this man’s impressive body of work, but I feel that these ten films – more than any of his others – would help to serve as a welcome pack to De Niro’s career. If there are some people out there who haven’t seen these films, then you should go away, see them, and then come back.

De Niro in one of his rare, actually good, comedic roles of the past ten years; Analyze This (1999).

But I reckon ninety nine per cent of you will have seen these films, and that’s cool too, because I want the list to also serve as a commemoration of De Niro. It’s a look back on a better time for him, where he wouldn’t even dare to pick up huge pay checks and, basically, sell out to a film that is neither artistically or aesthetically satisfying. You can understand why he now wants to make films like “Meet the Parents” and “Analyze This” (I’ve used two of the better films in his recent filmography), because his recent fight with cancer is enough to make anybody want to explore the lighter side of life. I can see why he would no longer want to put so much of himself into his roles, but I’m a little disappointed that we’ll never see another Travis Bickle. But hey, so is life. As De Niro retires to the shadows, Christian Bale, Johnny Depp, and Sean Penn are there to take his place as Hollywood’s favourite.
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