Cape fear, taxi driver, goodfellas, bloody mama, meet the parents, analyze this(both comedies), bang the drum slowly, raging bull, the fan, everybody's fine, silver linings playbook are all very different from each other. And I did acknowledge his other roles. Go back and read it. I said he was great in Godfather 1&2, dog day afternoon, Carlito's way, serpico, Donnie brasco and justice for all. Al Pacino's roles all haven't been too much different from each other. He plays best as a mobster or cop. He plays the same roles for the most part. Pacino is not good at comedy while De Niro has proved to be very good at comedy. I'm not saying in my opinion but based on his general reception when he was doing his comedy acts. De Niro has more range to go from character to character it seems. When I say he invests more, I mean look at what he did for raging bull, he gained like 60 pounds to portray the older jake Lamotta. He didn't eat for days to play his dug addicted character in bloody mama, he was a taxi driver in manhattan so he could get his role down for taxi driver, he even went to Sicily and lived there in order to get the language down for the Godfather 2. He always wanted to get his character down to the tee. For instance, when he played jimmy Conway he wanted to know the big things and little things about him, such as how he held a cigarette and so on. Based on the documentaries I've seen of him, he is basically the unofficial co-director because he always has input on his movies. Not all of them I'm sure, but many of them. Such as Scorsese's movies. Scorsese has said that De Niro helps a lot in the directing process and always has ideas on how to make the movie better.