Hollywood actor, ROBERT DE NIRO, is celebrating his 80th birthday today.
In 2019, one of the most acclaimed movies of recent years was released, featuring a star-studded cast. Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino were the ones who starred in the title that is now one of the most-watched on Netflix.
The gangster drama was directed by one of the most acclaimed directors in the film industry: Martin Scorsese. Of course, if there was anyone who could bring together such high-caliber actors it was the iconic filmmaker.
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The movie was nominated for 10 Oscars in 2020 but did not win in any category. However, the project amassed over 350 nominations in total, winning 80 other awards at various ceremonies during the same year.
You could, of course, do a whole season simply on De Niro and Scorsese’s enduring collaboration – some high points of which, including their breakout Mean Streets and their misunderstood musical, New York, New York, aren’t available to stream in the UK. The partnership seemed to have run its course in the mid-90s until their hefty and surprisingly poignant reunion on The Irishman (Netflix) four years ago: a film coloured by the pair’s mutual awareness of ageing and patriarchal rot. It’s a work with a heavy, sighing tread – a far cry from the angry, edgy characterisation of ruined veteran Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, or the pummelling character study of their Jake LaMotta biopic Raging Bull, in which De Niro’s daunting, all-in commitment to the boxer’s personal toxicity and physical deterioration landed him an Oscar and a reputation as his generation’s premier method man…
To mark the occasion, Mubi has programmed a quartet of De Niro films on its platform this month. Sergio Leone’s vast, glorious, bullet-holed underworld tapestry Once Upon a Time in America and Terry Gilliam’s loopy surrealist dystopia Brazil can be streamed there now, with De Niro’s unnerving high-wire turn in Martin Scorsese’s tangy media satire The King of Comedy and his terse, tough-guy showdown with Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat still to come. It’s a gilded selection that nonetheless, Scorsese’s film aside, doesn’t include the actor’s most obvious or dazzling tours de force. More than 100 films into his career, De Niro’s greatest hits run deep.
