A brief flurry of tabloid interest surged around Robert De Niro a few months ago, after the news that he had fathered his seventh child at the age of 79. I had no particular interest in the story: the jolt to me was the reminder that De Niro, still among the most vital and magnetic of working actors, was pushing 80 – a birthday he in fact celebrates next week. That’s an age at which many actors are sidelined into dully avuncular supporting roles, if they’re not retired altogether. De Niro, soon to be seen on slyly terrifying form as a lead in Martin Scorsese’s crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, has rather more fight left in him.
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.
