There are very few films that have had such an impact on me as Taxi Driver, I was in my first year at college doing A-Levels and had a lucky couple of gaps in my timetable that gave me periods off in the afternoon.  I was studying Drama and English Literature and had got into the habit of buying videos blind to take home and watch on my own whilst my parents were at work and my sister was in school, one such movie was Taxi Driver which I selected solely on the strength of its star Robert De Niro, unaware at that point who the director was.

I remember it was a bright summer’s day and I closed the curtains to darken the room, submerging myself into the mire of 1970s New York street life for the best part of two hours, completely unprepared for the terrifying but cathartic bloodbath that punctuates the film’s climax.  I had seen on-screen violence in gangster films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather or Brian De Palma’s Scarface but they were very removed from my reality and depicted in an operatic or comic book fashion.  Here Martin Scorsese’s carnage is all the more shocking because it’s so matter-of-fact, almost mundane and yet somewhat arbitrary that you can’t help but imagine this just might happen in real life.

Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, the ultimate pathological loner, a Vietnam veteran who is so dislocated from society and unable to sleep at night that he takes to working long shifts as a cab driver, a job that leads him to witness the excessive, heinous, underbelly of urban life, two decades before Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “Zero Tolerance” policy cracked down on crime and cleaned up inner-city New York making it a much safer place for both commerce and tourism.

Whilst off-duty Travis fantasises about Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) a young woman who works at the presidential campaign offices of Senator Charles Palantine, he pictures her as a vision in pure white in stark contrast to the many prostitutes he sees working the streets at night, and yet when he finally gets the opportunity to take her out they go to see a Swedish sex education film showing in a porno theatre; illustrating how socially inept and insular he has become, as if his intractable solitude is dictating behaviour hell-bent on ensuring his isolation.

Bickle refers to himself in his journal, which serves as a narrated voice-over, as “God’s Lonely Man”, quoting from the essay by Thomas Wolfe, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”  Screenwriter Paul Schrader said that he set out to write about the experience of circumstantial loneliness, after he left his wife for another woman who in turn quickly left him, but instead discovered that seclusion was a disease for which we must actively seek a cure.

Betsy rejects Travis and he loses the one image of chastity which he held above the filth and depravity that’s rife on the streets.  Before, when Senator Palantine took a ride in his taxi, he had suggested that somebody should clean up the crime and pollution but now he decides that he must take direct action; reverting to his Marine-trained mentally, he arms himself and targets the presidential candidate, primarily because of his association to Betsy.  However, Travis fails to assassinate Palantine and turns his attentions instead to Iris (Jody Foster) a child prostitute who jumped into the back of his cab one night, he makes it his mission to liberate her from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel) an incredibly violent act of vigilantism which is ironically misconstrued by the press as heroic.

Taxi Driver is one of those rare ‘Gestalt-like’ moments in cinema history where a writer, a director and an actor come together and the resulting synergy unexpectedly explodes onto the screen; add to that Michael Chapman’s resourceful cinematography, given the movie’s low budget and short schedule on real locations, and the last score of legendary Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann and you have the perfect motion picture hard to conceive how it could be improved in any way.

Not surprisingly Sony Pictures have gone to town with the 35th anniversary Blu-ray edition, presenting Taxi Driver in a full 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 transfer that restores vibrant colour to the neon lit night scenes contrasted, with exceptional clarity, to the inky-black, smoke-filled streets of New York.  On its original cinematic release Scorsese was asked to desaturate the blood to avoid an X-certificate, here the shades of red are gloriously restored.  The DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack is also a marked improvement, showcasing Bernard Herrmann’s rich jazz score with its unsettling use of harps but maintaining dialogue quality which was always somewhat muffled on previous DVD versions.

All the extras that were available on prior releases are presented here but upscaled to HD, along with some brand new material including a feature length commentary from writer Paul Schrader, a recent interview with director Martin Scorsese, a suite of short featurettes focusing on different aspects of the production, the best of which is Influence and Appreciation: A Martin Scorsese Tribute presented by Oliver Stone who was a student of Scorsese’s at NYU.  There is also an interactive script-to-screen option which allows you to follow the original screenplay in detail as the film plays.

Taxi Driver is a visceral and enduring film which was the “coming of age” for three of the most distinctive voices of the 1970s boom-time in American independent cinema, they were to reach their peak and close the decade with another remarkable movie Raging Bull but that, as they say, is another story.

I was given Tetro on Blu-ray as a Christmas present but I had delayed watching it as with Francis Ford Coppola’s previous release Youth Without Youth I was actually expecting to be very much disappointed by it, luckily this was not to be the case and its clearly his best entirely original screenplay since The Conversation and his most personal film since Apocalypse Now, I engaged with it so much that I wished it had another 30 minutes running time.

The premise for Tetro is actually very slight Bennie a waiter on a cruise liner, decides to look up his long lost older brother Angelo whilst on shore leave in Buenos Aires.  He discovers him living with his common law wife Miranda (Maribel Verdú) only now he calls himself ‘Tetro’ and claims he no longer wants anything to do with his real family.  Angelo and Bennie are the sons of a celebrated concert conductor although they had different mothers; Angelo’s was an opera singer and died in a car crash whilst he was at the wheel and that, along with another incident between him and his father over a mutual lover, has left him mentally and emotionally scarred.

What struck me immediately about Tetro is how good it looks, I had my doubts as I knew it was shot totally digitally but Mihai Malaimare Junior’s 1080p/24 source HDCAM photography is stunning, shot predominately in monochrome using a 2.35:1 aspect ratio but electing to use a smaller ratio for 1960s home movie style, washed out colour flashbacks and full “Technicolor” for the Powell and Pressburger inspired fantasy ballet sequences.  There is obviously no loss in quality when transferring this to Blu-ray and the film’s visuals are demonstration material and further proof that there will be life after celluloid in this medium.

Newcomer Alden Ehrenreich is a revelation as Bennie, there aren’t many young actors who could hold their own in their screen debut opposite the force of nature that is Vincent Gallo who embodies the damaged Tetro with equal measures of egotistical charm and severe self-loathing; the acting across the board is faultless as with most Coppola productions he insists on a large amount of read-through, rehearsal and improvisational time before shooting and it always pays off in the camera.

Bennie cannot understand why Tetro appears so cold towards him, especially after leaving him a note claiming that he would return to collect him from New York at some point. Both brothers have aspirations to become writers but Tetro along with his past has abandoned his great work, an unfinished play about their father, but when Bennie discovers it in a dusty suitcase he sees not only an opportunity to finish the story but by staging it at the local cafe theatre where Tetro works the lights he can force him to confront his demons.

In the few scenes where he appears Klaus Maria Brandauer brings great presence to the dual role of the elder Tetrocini brothers and Coppola reveals just enough for us to understand the dynamics between the rival siblings; as the maestro Carlo he is effortlessly charismatic, his fame and fortune seducing his son Angelo’s girlfriend, and as Alfredo you see an older man forced to live in the shadow of his younger brother’s success.  These themes are echoed in the future generation of Tetrocini brothers with Angelo envying Bennie’s acclaim when his finished version of his play entitled “Wander Lust” is shortlisted for the top prize at the Patagonia Festival gaining the approval of the mysterious critic “Alone” played by Pedro Almodóvar’s muse Carmen Maura; Tetro had once been her protégée but they had a falling out over artistic differences.

I shan’t spoil the film’s climatic twist which occurs in the extended Patagonia sequence which many critics have dismissed out of hand as self-indulgent without one I’ve read bothering to comment that stylistically it’s very obviously an homage to Federico Fellini and no doubt aware of its unreal quality.  I want to say that Tetro could well be the best film of the decade but I know that I’d be stretching it, however it is certainly Francis Ford Coppola’s best film in a very long time and as such it should be regarded as he is one of the true artists working in cinema today.

I first met Jonathan Owen back in 2013 when I was working on the Cass Pennant documentary Casuals, he was one of the many interviewees who helped to tell the history of the Mod and Casual fashion scene.

As many have testified Jonny is genuinely one of the nicest fellows you’re likely to come across, especially in the entertainment industry, and his winning charm is at the heart of the success of the Svengali project that he has been working on since the first viral debuted on YouTube back in 2009.

The original series of webisodes came to the attention of Mod culture and music fans alike and was hailed by the London Evening Standard as the “best thing on the Internet” at the time.  Featuring a smattering of cameos from the world of Rock, including real-life ‘Svengali’ Alan McGee and Carl Barât of The Libertines, it charts the arrival of former Welsh postman Paul ‘Dixie’ Dean in London with high hopes of promoting the raw and rowdy band The Premature Congratulations to the topper-most-of-the-popper-most.

Whilst the five minute virals focused primarily on Dixie’s naivety and his relationship with his old Valley’s oppo Brian Horse(y) now a successful A&R man, whose contacts include all the leading lights of the British music biz, the feature film expands his world turning the spotlight on his long-suffering fiancée Shell played by the redoubtable, BAFTA award winning actress, Vicky McClure.

Along with the central romantic plot line we also finally get to see The Prems as well as an insight into Dixie’s Welsh roots; particularly effective is the scene where his father played by the late Brian Hibbard tells Dixie that he’s not long for life and they share a poetic moment of pure cinematic gold.  I come back to this scene time and again, not only has it been made more poignant by Hibbard’s own death not long after the film was completed, but because I can’t tell if it’s totally written or completely improvised, either way it’s a marvelous acting tour-de-force by the two men.

The key thing that the film manages to reveal in far greater depth is the fundamental difference between Dixie and Horsey who, on paper, could be considered two sides of the same coin.  Both hail from the same humble beginnings but one has completely reinvented himself cocking a snook at his past, whilst the other totally embraces it.  It’s a shame that Roger Evans’ performance as Horsey seems to have been largely overlooked by the critics, barely being mentioned in most of the mainstream reviews that I’ve read, he is the necessary Yin to Dixie’s Yang and the understated combination of embarrassment, envy and bemusement he displays on screen is one of the movie’s core strengths.

Svengali manages to be at once a satire of the music and fashion scene, with Martin Freeman’s Mod-Elite record store owner and Matt Berry’s outrageously intimidating record label boss providing many of the laughs, but it’s also a romantic comedy, a rags to riches story and a buddy movie; this sounds disjointed but it actually holds together very well.  This is no doubt due to Jonny Owen’s central performance as Dixie, in the frame almost all of the time his warmth, generosity and sincerity ooze off the screen.

In one of the best scenes an exposed Horsey, who spends all of his time with yes men, cut-throat media types and prostitutes, ponders on what Dixie has that he doesn’t and whilst he narrowly focuses on how he is able to spot musical talent it is apparent that the major thing that Paul Dean has over Brian Horse in his life is love; both familial and romantic.  Dixie has kept true to himself and where he has hailed from so consequently, despite walking away from everything he aspired to he retains his dignity and his passion for life.

Svengali has proven that it is possible to make a quality low budget, independent film in the UK that doesn’t have to fit a cookie-cutter mold to reach its audience.  The film’s journey echoes Dixie’s spirit in every frame and it’s a testament to everyone who believed in it and worked on bringing it to the big screen over the years.  I am very excited to see what Root Films, the joint venture between Jonny Owen and producer Martin Root, do next and I wish them continued success.