Analyze These: Robert De Niro's best performances, ranked

De Niro doesn’t head into horror waters often, but when he does it’s worth watching to see how his intense eyes and immersive style play out in the genre. In Angel Heart, De Niro has a wonderful time portraying the neo-noir film’s version of the Devil himself, a man as casually cruel as he is bemused by human suffering. It’s certainly far from De Niro’s most understated work, but it’s also proof that he’s chameleonic enough to work in a variety of genres while still keeping verisimilitude intact.

De Niro purists often balk at projects like Meet The Parents, but it’s hard to deny just how good the legendary actor is in the role of the Suspicious Father and the straight man to Ben Stiller’s goofy neurotic future son-in-law. We’d known for a long time that De Niro could do broad comedy, but it’s his ability to blend that broadness with an honest sense of humanity that makes this performance sing.

By the 1990s, De Niro was a two-time Oscar winner with enough clout to convey a sense of calm authority without so much as raising his voice. That meant a whole new category of roles, including the character of Sam in John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Intense, detail-oriented, and always looking out for himself, Sam isn’t the flashiest De Niro performance, but he is a classic example of the actor’s cool authority in action cinema and beyond.

Once Upon A Time in America, Sergio Leone’s epic about two best friends who become gangsters in the first half of the 20th century, is an American tragedy. The film tells us so from the beginning, and while the characters don’t necessarily know their fates, De Niro’s performance as David “Noodles” Aaronson carries that tragedy throughout the entire saga. Everything about his work in this film, particularly in the calm moments that stand against James Woods’ more fiery ones, suggests a man carrying a burden that will one day collapse him, and the subtlety with which De Niro plays that is proof of the depth of his talent.

At his best, Robert De Niro is an invaluable comedic force because he can lend authenticity and bite to just about any premise, no matter how wild. Wag The Dog, in which De Niro plays a spin doctor crafting a fictitious war to save a President’s reputation, requires him to muster every ounce of that power, and it works not just scene to scene, but second to second. There’s an investment in even the film’s strangest moments, and that makes it a wonderful black comedy showcase for De Niro.

If we had to pick one year that made Robert De Niro, 1973 would probably be the winner. He hadn’t yet won his first Oscar, but that year he did appear in two films that cemented his status as one of the most important actors of his generation. The first came as Bruce Pearson, a terminally ill catcher from Georgia, in Bang The Drum Slowly. One of De Niro’s trademarks is his ability to transform into a character while never losing his understated emotional resonance, and this film is an early example of just how well that gift works.

Sometimes Robert De Niro can turn up in a film for just a few minutes, make a big impact, then zip right back out, never stealing focus from the stars but always doing something memorable. In Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, De Niro showcased that skill as Harry Tuttle, an engineer stirred to rebellion by the bureaucracy around him. He knows exactly the kind of movie he’s in, he doesn’t overstay his welcome, and he fits right into Gilliam’s wacky sensibility while still feeling authentically like himself.

De Niro and director Martin Scorsese went bigger and grander for their gangster movie follow-up to Goodfellas, but Casino is about more than the bright lights of Las Vegas and the violent allure of the mob. As Ace Rothstein, a casino boss beset on all sides by complication, De Niro delivers a restrained, deeply nuanced performance. We never feel like we get to know Ace all that well, but De Niro’s work behind the character’s eyes means we never stop trying to figure him out.

De Niro was so moved by Chazz Palminteri’s play of the same name that he took it upon himself to direct the film version and chose a role for himself that went against the gangster movie grain. And A Bronx Tale is better for it. As Lorenzo, a father who earns his living as a bus driver in a neighborhood surrounded by wealthy mobsters, De Niro skillfully portrays a man who must walk a fine line between two worlds, and somehow teach his son to do the same. It’s one of his most moving performances.

De Niro’s entry into the world of Quentin Tarantino films remains a coup for the director, and a gem in the actor’s filmography. As the quiet criminal Louis Gara, De Niro gets to simultaneously work on a heist film and dig into the dialogue-laden, just-vibes hangout movie sections of Jackie Brown, and he excels in both. It’s also the film that features perhaps the most casual murder in De Niro’s career, and one of the funniest payoffs.

It was only a matter of time before De Niro decided to poke fun at his gangster movie persona, but even with that sense of inevitability hanging over it, Analyze This plays like something remarkably fresh. A two-hander alongside comedy legend Billy Crystal, the film proves that De Niro’s comedic chops are capable of shouldering an entire all-out laugh fest, and shows his often awe-inspiring talent for being funny and scary at the same time.

One of De Niro’s finest supporting performances, Moe Tilden in Cop Land doesn’t get a lot of screen time, and doesn’t get to partake in some of the film’s bigger moments. But that never stopped De Niro from making an impact, and as an internal affairs cop who’s trying to work within a crooked system yet is realistic about the skewed world around him, he gets a lot of mileage from a fairly short ride.

By the time of The Untouchables, De Niro had already won two Oscars, one for playing a mobster and the other for playing a boxer, so you’d think we might have seen the limits of what he could do in terms of being tough onscreen. But as Al Capone in Brian de Palma’s true-crime classic, De Niro reveals we’ve only just scratched the surface, delivering a ferocious, bold, absolutely committed performance that steals the film from a talented cast that includes Kevin Costner and Sean Connery.

There’s a sense of barely controlled chaos running through David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which means that for most of his scenes as Pat Solitano Sr., Robert De Niro is shouting to be heard. It’s a film so dense with big emotions and bigger arguments that you’d be forgiven for thinking everyone just came in and dialed it to 11 for every scene, but there’s more to the film than the family fights. There’s real depth and heart to every moment, and nowhere is that more apparent than when De Niro is onscreen, trying to find a way through the madness however he can.

De Niro has played his share of villains in his career, but few have ever felt so believably despicable as Dwight Hansen, the violent stepfather of This Boy’s Life. Dwight’s pain is on full display throughout the film, but De Niro’s depiction is more about his absolute brutality to Leonard DiCaprio’s Toby, including often stomach-churning scenes of violence and cruelty. It’s not a performance that generates a lot of empathy for the character, but the depth of De Niro’s work also never fails to captivate.

Embodying a role previously portrayed by no less an icon than Robert Mitchum, De Niro went into Cape Fear in the shadow of a screen legend. He came out of it having put his own slithery, squirm-inducing spin on Max Cady, a criminal who terrorizes the family of his former lawyer. It’s one of De Niro’s most exaggerated performances, but the bigness of the work doesn’t detract from its impact. In fact, it proves that De Niro can go big, even sometimes almost cartoonish, and still make us believe him.

As bounty hunter Jack Walsh in Midnight Run, De Niro got a chance to play with certain familiar genre ingredients, operating as a tough guy who seems to have it all together, only to reveal over the course of the film that he’s actually carrying around a lot of pain. It’s perhaps not surprising that De Niro can play that dynamic, but his ability to sell it while also working through broad action-comedy fun with Charles Grodin is what makes the performance truly brilliant.

The other 1973 film that helped launch De Niro as an acting powerhouse, Mean Streets gives the young actor a particularly fierce challenge. As Johnny Boy, the other half of the drama mostly led by Harvey Keitel’s Charlie, De Niro has to be a relentless dervish of chaos, anger, and sin. He has to act as the bad influence, the thing pulling Charlie further and further away from redemption, and he has to do it in a way that explains to the audience why Charlie insists on caring about him so much. It’s a high-wire act for the ages, and De Niro pulls it off with the skill of an old master.

It’s hard to stand out in a film that features the likes of John Cazale, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken (who won an Oscar for his role) doing some of their best work, but De Niro still manages to pull the spotlight toward him in The Deer Hunter. As Mike, a steelworker turned traumatized Vietnam veteran, he is the hunter of the title, and, as with films like Once Upon A Time In America, must play the role with impending tragedy hanging over his every move. He does it masterfully, and delivers some of the most intense scenes in his entire career.

Penny Marshall’s Awakenings is a beautiful, bittersweet drama featuring one of Robin Williams’ best performances, and one of De Niro’s most challenging. As Leonard Lowe, a catatonic man who gains, then loses, a new chance at life thanks to an experimental drug, De Niro has to both lose himself in a frozen existence, then come out of that loss, then drift back toward it again. It’s hard to watch, but that’s exactly the point, and the depth of emotion it provokes is proof of De Niro’s skill.

As the title character in The Irishman, De Niro delivers a performance that feels like a culmination, not just of his work with director Martin Scorsese, but of all the time he’s put in on a certain kind of character over the decades. As hitman Frank Sheeran, De Niro is a man beset on all sides by sin, both his own and those of his friends and collaborators. It’s a life he chose, but even he can’t fathom the depth of the damage to his own soul. As the film moves through the decades, De Niro moves through the stages of Frank discovering just how far gone he really is. It’s one of the great tragic performances of the 21st century so far, and proof that De Niro’s still got it, no matter how many forgettable roles he takes.

It’s the smile that really gets you. Everything about De Niro’s performance as Rupert Pupkin in Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy works, from the way he yells at his own mother to the awkward way he navigates the show business life he so desperately yearns to have. But it begins and ends with the way De Niro smiles. It’s the smile of someone who’s never felt truly happy, but has spent hours studying the way other people wear that smile like a mask. That sense of artificial enjoyment, coupled with a wonderful physical awkwardness, makes Pupkin both a remarkably tragic and a remarkably entertaining character. And he’s played by a guy who was then best known for straight-up drama.

Michael Mann’s Heat is best-remembered for its pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who shared scenes together for the first time in the film. Together they play like fire and ice, as Pacino embodies the dogged, troubled detective and De Niro, as master thief Neil McCauley, must play the man willing to walk away from anything, no matter how attached he gets. That means Pacino gets the flashier performance, but De Niro’s calculating, constantly angling work as McCauley is the more emotionally affecting of the two. You can see the man fighting the coldness in his own nature, even as he keeps giving into it.

Travis Bickle is not a rage-spouting, violent vigilante when we meet him in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He’s a quiet, lonely man with nothing but time on his hands, trapped in a world he doesn’t understand, a world he seeks to alter so that it makes just a little more sense. That’s a frightening idea, and it’s made all the more frightening by the understated, soulful way De Niro approaches the transformation. He plays the role like a coiled spring ready to explode out into your eyeballs, and that makes him both compelling and constantly unsettling.

The role that won De Niro his first Oscar was same one that previously earned another actor, Marlon Brando, an Academy Award. That meant very big shoes to fill, but in one of the great master strokes of his career, De Niro stepped into young Vito Corleone’s shoes seeking not to imitate the mannerisms of Brando, but the sense of coolness permeating every pore of the character in The Godfather. His version of Vito is leaner, meaner, and perhaps not quite so wise, but you never doubt for a second that he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s a showstopper of a performance, even when you consider everything Pacino is doing in the other half of The Godfather: Part II.

Ray Liotta was the star of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and Joe Pesci’s performance was big and bold enough to earn him an Oscar, but that doesn’t take away from what De Niro is doing in the film. As Jimmy Conway, he has to be the brains of the trio’s little mob operation, but as his friends descend deeper into violence and drugs, he also has to be the voice of reason, the conscience of the group. That’s not an easy thing to pull off, particularly when the film constantly reminds you that, despite his thoughtfulness, Jimmy will kill you at any moment if he has to.

De Niro’s second Oscar came for his role in Scorsese’s black-and-white masterpiece about Jake LaMotta, a legendary boxer whose life outside the ring was often more brutal than his life inside the ring. Today, the film is best remembered for Scorsese’s dynamic boxing sequences, and the major weight gain De Niro took on to portray LaMotta later in life. But Raging Bull offers far more than a drastic physical transformation from one of our finest actors. There are depths to this performance that no other work in De Niro’s entire career can offer, a tremendous soulfulness that infuses even the most vicious, nakedly violent sequences with heart, humanity, and heartbreak. It’s De Niro at his absolute best, and an all-time great performance in American cinema.