Night on Earth

Jarmusch is a true visionary; he knows his films can't bring order to the ravishing chaos around him, but he can't resist the fun of trying. In this compassionate comedy of missed connections, he makes us see the ordinary in fresh and pertinent ways. But the flickers of humanity in those taxis are soon dulled by barriers of time, sex, race, language and money. They are flickers in a vast emotional void. Read full review

Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt. Read full review

In Night on Earth, Jarmusch is painting with colors he has never used before. The transformation is thrilling. Read full review

With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors. Read full review

As ever with Jarmusch, as the five sequential stories proceed toward their unexpectedly poignant conclusion, there's a touch of the experimental at play; but it's also a film of great warmth. Character prevails throughout, and with the exception of a miscast Ryder, the performances are terrific. Though it may take a while to get Jarmusch's gist, hang in there; by the time Tom Waits growls his lovely closing waltz over the credits, Jarmusch has shown us moments most film-makers don't even notice. Read full review

Almost unavoidably uneven, it gets off to a rough start in a segment that relies too heavily on Winona Ryder's charms as a pixieish grease monkey. But it improves as it goes, and in segment after segment, Jarmusch's characters strive, almost heroically, to make human connections, even ones that won't last beyond the moment when they pay their fares. Read full review

Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth is an agreeably flaky comedy built around a surefire hook. Each of the film’s five segments consists of a single extended taxicab ride through a different city; the idea is that each excursion is taking place at exactly the same time. The movie is like a hipster’s ramshackle version of traveling around the world and never leaving the Hilton. Read full review

Some of the segments are more successful than others, yet all of them have the haunting quality of a completely insignificant event that someone might remember years later. Night on Earth tries to stop the clock and cast a net over the whole mystery, and while the film never loses its humor, the wistfulness, yearning and deep affection at its heart is are unmistakable. [29 May 1992, p.D1]

Night on Earth makes inspired use of its well-known cast, especially during the first three of its five episodes about cab drivers around the world and their fares. For all their predictability, the stories are fun to watch because the actors dig in and work them over. [22 May 1992, p.22]

Jarmusch is a poet of the night. Much of Night on Earth creates the same kind of lonely, elegaic, romantic mood as Mystery Train, his film about wanderers in nighttime Memphis. Tom Waits' music helps to establish this mood of cities that have been emptied of the waking. It's as if the minds of these night people are affected by all of the dreams and nightmares that surround them. Read full review

Jim Jarmusch gives us five different, self-contained episodes in five taxis in five cities on one night. The episodic structure breaks up Jarmusch's usual funky minimalism: It makes it less of a drag. Episodic movies usually don't work; we seem to settle into a story just when it ends and we're thrust into the next one. But Jarmusch's film may be a special case. Unbroken, his vague, meandering scenarios have sometimes dawdled into oblivion. But here, as in his last film, Mystery Train, the anomie is at least given some variation. Read full review

An easy to take followup to his previous pic Mystery Train. Beginning with an outer-space shot gradually zeroing in on planet Earth, the director covers in five separate segments his favorite theme of lonely people interacting but ultimately facing the great void alone. Read full review

Individually, the episodes aren't much, but it's impressive that Jarmusch even pulled off the logistics. [01 May 1992, p.7D]

Jarmusch is interesting, and funny, even when he's falling flat. And the real unifying agent here, Tom Waits' determinedly bouncy sound track, is full of perverse whimsy; it works a kind of magic on the film. It's a good thing. Night on Earth much needs the magic. [08 May 1992, p.G5]

Jarmusch leaves us with a highly entertaining and thoroughly oddball collage celebrating the typically inconsequential nature of most daily encounters. Read full review

Though mildly interesting for their individual merits, there is little sense of their connection to each other as a film and to us as an audience. It's as though this cab ride of a movie keeps moving forward with no clear destination or purpose. Read full review

Although his (Jarmusch) films have moments of sly obliqueness, they leave us feeling stranded in underdevelopment. This is the case with Night on Earth, which is launched on a promising conceit - nocturnal taxi rides in five cities around the world during the same time slot. By the time the film ends, we can't help wondering just who has been taken for a ride. [15 May 1992, p.85]

The film's chief delight is the sharp and funny international cast. But Jarmusch's comic touch keeps curdling into corn. The minimalist is a sentimentalist, which would be ok if he didn't cover it all with an incense of cosmic pretentiousness. [18 May 1992, p.66]

Even in his poorest work (i.e., this movie), director Jarmusch retains an appealing sense of experimentation. He fills his movies with those clumsy, unhurried moments between people. But in Night on Earth, with five vignettes to get through, he's forced to create faster, more sketchlike pieces. He's just not up to the task. Nor do performers Winona Ryder, Isaach De Bankole, Roberto Benigni and others pick up the improvisational ball. Read full review

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements. Read full review