10 Essential Robert De Niro Performances

De Niro's last great outing came here, in David O. Russell's manic, touching comedy, which stars the actor as an angry, OCD suffering football fan at odds with his son (Bradley Cooper) and his team. Widely considered his best role since Heat (1995), Silver Linings Playbook is the highlight of De Niro's work in the aughts. 

And while it doesn't contain anything like the searing intensity of young De Niro (how could it?), it does offer something else: the actor in old age. Seeing De Niro in a cardigan on the couch, fiddling with the remotes, is disconcerting at first, but later we realise that this is the actor settling in to a different type of role, one which lets him play the father to a character he realistically might've played in his youth (in this case Cooper's Pat, a beguiling presence who suffers from anger issues). Not that De Niro doesn't have his moments though: his fight with Cooper is a reminder that there's still a little old-fashioned violence left in him yet. 

It's fitting that De Niro received his seventh Oscar nomination for Silver Linings Playbook, nominated, for the first time since his initial nomination (and win, for The Godfather Part II), in the supporting actor category.