10 Essential Robert De Niro Performances

It's strange that Robert De Niro gets so much stick these days. 

Granted, he's spent the majority of his older years appearing in insipid, uninspiring films, barely registering a performance of note in nearly two decades save for a couple of David O. Russell pictures or the odd film with an old, interesting director from his past (What Just Happened?, for instance, which saw De Niro re-team with Barry Levinson, whom he previously worked with on Wag The Dog). But the fact of the matter is that De Niro has earned the right to star in whatever he wants, and while it may tar his legacy a touch, it's nowhere near enough to tarnish his greatness overall.

Many great artists wane over time, and one with a body of work as big as De Niro's (currently approaching 104 films) is bound to have missteps and mistakes. The actor De Niro is most commonly linked with, Marlon Brando, suffered a similar fate, and his late work contained far more bad than it did good. 

But does that stop Brando from being the greatest actor of all time? No it doesn't, and no amount of phoned-in performances can outweigh the greatness of Brando's and De Niro's finest creations.

In celebration of that notion, let's take a look back over his filmography revel in ten essential performances from one of the best to ever do it. 

Not one of his biggest performances, De Niro's turn as Louis Gara in Quentin Tarantino's still underrated Jackie Brown is instead great for its brevity. (It's also not big in character sense, with De Niro playing a humble, polite ex-con right up until the point he snaps in a trademark burst of Tarantino violence.)

Far from being the main character, De Niro appears in only a handful of scenes, mostly lolling about on a couch with Bridget Fonda's stoner/surfer-chick, Melanie.

But what he lacks in screen-time De Niro makes up for in performance, presenting Gara as a laconic man, a balancing act to the over-the-top antics of Sam Jackson's motor-mouthed Ordell Robbie. There's something disquieting about watching an actor as ready for violence as De Niro play subdued, and the aforementioned moment of it is made better by the fact that, this time, we really didn't expect it (though we really should have).

Jackie Brown is De Niro at his professional best, letting the vibrant, more-memorable characters do their thing until it's time for him to steal the show. Look out for his 15 second sex-scene with Fonda, one of the best Worst Sex Scenes in recent memory.