As in Jim Jarmusch's previous project, Mystery Train, the structure of this one fairly leaps out at us: five consecutive taxi rides in five different cities of the world, all after dark. It sounds like an idea for a movie, or at least like the germ of an idea for a movie -- a sort of hack's Dead of Night, transforming the traditional omnibus into, more precisely, an omnicab. But the fill-in for this structure is unfulfilling: didactic cornball little anecdotal one-acters that don't add up to much because each of them on its own is too near a zero. And too near a dead end. The best part of each segment falls outside the storyline: mini-albums of static shots introducing each city -- L.A., New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki -- as well as some along-the-way "sightseeing" shots of whatever area the cab happens to be passing through. In common with some of the most mysterious and portentous of urban photographs (those of Atget, those of Abbott), there is the sense about these shots that, outside their spatial and temporal frame, some unguessable story might now be taking place, or already have taken place, or be just about to take place. And at any of these spots we might wish we could order the cab to pull over, let us out, and allow us to enter a different movie. Preferably one by a different moviemaker. Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, Roberto Benigni. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.