Of course M and Taxi Driver are both great; classics to a man. But you could be forgiven for wondering when Village Voice critic and Sight & Sound contributing editor Taubin gets through with the latter. Her reading, aside from being structurally prosaic, explicates little more than her stubborn determination not to differentiate between a film about a racist and one that is itself bigoted. ‘Racism’, she declares, ‘is the problem with which Taxi Driver never quite comes to terms.’ This evasion, she goes on to say, ‘prevents it from being a truly great film.’ On a fundamental level she seems to misread the picture’s embracing psychopathology.

As when Travis and Betsy’s date takes in a porno, the author insisting it offers ‘a violation, a psychological rape’. Travis, she says, ‘wants to rub Betsy’s face in the muck.’ Whereas, properly viewed from the eponymous anti-hero’s insular world, it makes all too chilling sense. The world of Taxi Driver, as Taubin seems all too eager to reject, is the life of the mind; we are voyeurs of psychosis. This is, after all, Paul Schrader’s most personal screenplay.

Elsewhere she pushes the right (and obvious) buttons, drawing in Arthur Bremer, The Searchers and Schrader’s debt to Bresson, but, fatally, makes no attempt at discussing the film - arguably the quintessence of 70s existentialism - in terms of either its director (raised a Catholic) or writer (Calvinist). Her only real contribution is to suggest that maybe Travis’ Vietnam vet status is bogus. An opportunity squandered.

Anton Kaes’ deconstruction of Fritz Lang, on the other hand, is a work of scholarship. Unlike Taubin, Kaes is more than prepared to weigh the picture in both its historical context - an austere Berlin slipping beneath the fascist heel - and cinematic one, seeing it both as a hangover from Expressionism and as proto-Noir. The picture is Lang’s Hollywood rehearsal, he implies, despite not sharing ‘the gangster film’s dream of upward mobility, its moral certitude and its love of violent action.’

Kaes isolates what he calls the ‘ironic seriality’ of both subject and method, and pinpoints how the film works as surprisingly ambiguous polemic. Its attitude to Capital Punishment is left tantalisingly unstated, allowing the Nazis to try to claim the film-maker for their own. (Lang fled to America.) And how the picture uncannily echoes the activities of contemporary German serial killers like Peter Kürten to Fritz Haarmann, with much of the picture’s furore shown as media driven. ‘The city - like Germany itself under Heinrich Brüning in 1931 - was no longer governed by the rule of law,’ Kaes writes, ‘but swayed by the pressure of the mobilised masses.’ As good as the Taubin is lacklustre.