No one is going to argue with you too much if you suggest that Robert De Niro is the greatest actor of all time. His list of classics are undeniable — The Godfather Part 2, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Heat, Jackie Brown… And even lesser known performances like The King of Comedy, Brazil or 1900 would be most other actor’s greatest hits.
There’s something you might notice about those films listed above: they’re all pretty old. It’s a pretty acknowledged fact that Robert De Niro doesn’t make good films any more. Heat and Jackie Brown were in the mid 90s. And Dirty Grandpa and Grudge Match aren’t really on the same level of The Godfather, are they? But when exactly did he give up? Cartoonist James Chapman has been using advanced statistical methods to work this out. He plotted the Rotten Tomatoes scores of all of De Niro’s films on a graph chronologically, and the findings are very clear.
Robert De Niro stopped trying in 2002, aged 59.
Al Pacino on the other hand, has always been all over the map.
He also found that the quality of Leo and McConaughey’s films were improving, but Nic Cage and John Cusack were in freefall.
