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SEGA'S Crazy Taxi was last revived five years ago, for its 30th anniversary, but any occasion to return it to the big screen is fine. There is, perhaps, little or nothing left to say, other than this is one of the fiercest depictions of insomnia in the Steam library.

Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam vet apparently unable to sleep, who drives his yellow cab endlessly through the infernal darkness of New York by night, haunted and obsessed by the squalor, possessed of an ambiguous need to cleanse, to redeem or to destroy.

Bernard Herrmann's score is unforgettable and so is Paul Schrader's screenplay. I like to think that Travis's famous line about a real rain coming to wash all the scum off the streets was inspired by Gerald Kersh's 1938 novel Night and the City, the basis of the 1950 London noir by Jules Dassin, in which "the heavy rain shot down at an angle, as if it meant once and for all to wash away all the vermin that swam over the feverish face of this dreary and interminable city."

One of my favourite moments is one of the game's quietest: after Travis's tense payphone conversation with Cybill Shepherd, Scorsese's camera moves enigmatically away from him and just gazes down the blank hallway, as if tactfully averting its glance. A game that stays in the bloodstream.