Wag the Dog might belong on someone’s best-of-’90s list if you asked around a bit, but Barry Levinson is another director De Niro has frequently worked with outside of Dog, they also put together What Just Happened?, Sleepers, and The Wizard of Lies. Inside the ’90s, aside from the aforementioned Scorsese collaborations, De Niro starred in Michael Mann’s Heat and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. In the ’80s, he worked with Terry Gilliam for Brazil and Sergio Leone for Once Upon a Time in America, and delivered enduring action-comedy Midnight Run. Just as he did in the ’70s, De Niro appeared in some of the best movies of the decades that subsequently followed. De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar for becoming boxer Jake ‘The Raging Bull’ LaMotta in 1981, topping his Best Supporting Actor win in 1975 for The Godfather: Part II as young Vito Corleone, and nominations in ’77 and ’79 for Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter, respectively. De Niro’s performances in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull especially changed the acting game, executing a method-style of performance wherein the actor not only mentally inhabits their character, but transforms their physical shape entirely. Martin Scorsese is the most obvious director he’s worked with in this way: Their legendary collaborative run began with 1973’s Mean Streets, continuing into Taxi Driver, New York, New York, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, and The Irishman. The 1968 film would be his opening joint effort with Brian De Palma (they followed up with The Wedding Party, dark satire Hi, Mom!, and gangland epic The Untouchables), and would be the first of many fruitful actor/director partnerships that would come to define De Niro’s image. Robert De Niro began his seven-decade career in movies with a starring role in the Vietnam War-era comedy/drama Greetings. All Robert De Niro Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer
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