'Taxi Driver' actor Robert De Niro's top movies to watch right now: 'The Irishman', 'Heat' and more

Robert De Niro is not just one of the greatest actors of his generation, he is one of the greatest actors who has ever lived, full stop. A two-time Oscar winner with a filmography that reads like a masterclass in what cinema can do when a performer is completely, fearlessly committed, he has given us some of the most unforgettable characters in movie history. Here are his finest films streaming right now.Directed by Martin Scorsese and co-starring Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd, De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a sleepless, socially alienated Vietnam veteran who drives a cab through the streets of New York at night and slowly convinces himself that the city needs saving whether it wants to be or not. It is a deeply uncomfortable film, deliberately so, and De Niro's performance is so fully inhabited that it feels less like acting and more like something you are not supposed to be watching. He received an Oscar nomination for this role, and the film remains one of the most studied and referenced pieces of American cinema ever made. If psychological drama shot through with dread is what you are looking for, Apple TV and Prime Video have it waiting.Directed by Francis Ford Coppola alongside Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton, De Niro plays the young Vito Corleone, building a quiet, measured portrait of a man constructing the empire we already know will one day consume his family. He does it almost entirely in Sicilian, with very little dialogue, and yet every scene crackles with a contained, watchful intelligence that won him his first Oscar. The only sequel in history to win Best Picture, it is essential crime cinema and it is on Prime Video.Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring De Niro alongside Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci, this is the film that defined the modern mob movie and has never been surpassed in the genre. De Niro plays Jimmy Conway, the cool, calculating veteran criminal around whom everything orbits, and he does it with a stillness that makes every rare moment of violence feel genuinely shocking. For anyone who has ever wanted to understand why crime cinema became its own art form, this is the place to start, and it is all on Prime Video.Directed by Michael Mann, this Los Angeles crime epic brought De Niro and Al Pacino face to face for the first time despite both having appeared in 'The Godfather Part II', and the film's central diner scene between the two of them remains one of the greatest pieces of acting ever committed to screen. De Niro plays Neil McCauley, a master thief who has stripped his life of everything that could be used against him, and Mann frames the whole film as a kind of tragic mirror between a man who lives by a code and the detective obsessed with breaking it. Crime thriller fans who want something with real weight and elegance will find it on JioHotstar and Netflix.Directed by David O. Russell and co-starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Jacki Weaver, this is De Niro in a register most audiences forget he is capable of warm, funny, quietly heartbreaking as Pat Sr., a superstitious Eagles-obsessed father trying to keep his family from falling apart. He received an Oscar nomination for the role, and it serves as a reminder that the same actor who played Travis Bickle can also make you laugh and ache in the space of a single scene. For anyone who thinks De Niro only does darkness, this crowd-pleasing drama on Prime Video will change that impression quickly.Directed by Martin Scorsese and reuniting De Niro with Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in what may be the final great collaboration between all of them, the film follows Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman who claims to have been involved in one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history. De Niro plays the entire arc of a man's life with a restraint that is almost devastating, and the film's final act, in which an old man sits alone with what he has done, is as quietly powerful as anything he has ever made. Epic crime drama spanning decades of American history, it is on Netflix and well worth clearing an evening for.What makes De Niro's filmography unlike almost anyone else's is the sheer range of it, from the terrifying stillness of Travis Bickle to the bumbling warmth of a football-obsessed father, from a Sicilian crime lord built entirely out of silence to a hitman quietly accounting for a lifetime of violence. No matter which film pulls you in first, the rest of the list will take care of itself.