Night on Earth review

 Number 478 on the top 1000 films of all time is Jim Jarmusch's comedy-drama anthology 'Night on Earth.'

Night on Earth tells five vignettes of five taxi drivers and their relationships with their passengers all on the same night across five different cities: Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome and Helsinki.

Night on Earth was a charming film that deftly navigated a number of themes including heartbreak, connection and comedy all while getting you to care about its characters in a limited space of time. Across five different short films with all different casts, we get to see what makes us different, but more importantly the same.

The first vignette focusses on LA taxi driver Corky (Wionna Ryder.) Corky is a tomboy and has no great aspirations in life beyond being a taxi driver and a mechanic. This is in contrast with her upper-class passenger, casting director Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands.) Despite their differences, they form a certain rapport and understanding by the end of their journey together. Victoria even wants to cast Corky in her latest film, but Corky is happy with her current direction in life. It was a nice little insight into how we work as people. Not everybody has lofty aspirations. Some people are happy with whatever they have and that's okay.

The second vignette is probably the funniest. It follows the relationship between East German immigrant Helmut's (Armin Mueller-Stahl's) first night as a taxi driver in New York. His passenger is the loud-mouthed and obnoxious Yo-Yo (Giancarlo Esposito) who startled at Helmut's seeming incompetence decides to drive the taxi instead. The two characters could not have been more different from each other yet they embodied a brilliant odd-couple relationship. Helmut was endearing and although Yo-Yo was a bit annoying at first, he ended up being likeable too.

Our third vignette takes us to Paris where after an unnamed Ivorian taxi driver (Isaach de Bankole) abruptly turfs out two rude passengers, he accepts a new fare of a blind woman (Beatrice Dalle.) It was a pleasant enough story but largely forgettable compared to the others. Although there were a few moments of humour.

The fourth story set in Rome was probably my least favourite. It focussed on eccentric taxi driver Gino (Roberto Benigni) who after picking up a priest (Paolo Bonecelli,) proceeds to make a toe-curling confession which is almost too much for the priest to bear. Although this story was played for laughs with Benigni largely improvising, I did find it far too zany and over-the-top for my tastes. Benigni was so over-the-top, he became rather annoying.

Thankfully, we had the final Helsinki storyline as a touching palate cleanser. It focusses on Finnish taxi driver Mika (Matti Pellonpaa) who relates his tragic personal history to his drunk passengers. It was bittersweet way of ending the film, but also helped to offset some of the Night on Earth's zanier storylines. It was one of my favourite stories of the five.

Being an anthology film, naturally some of the vignettes were better than others. However, I think the film worked both as a whole and individually. I definitely recommend it.

Megalopolis review

 Having been released in 2024, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is too young to feature on the top 1000 films of all time. It is unlikely to feature on any future editions of this list either.

Cesar Cantilina (Adam Driver) is a famous and influential architect in New Rome - an alternate, futuristic New York City. His creation of the element Megalon has proven revolutionary in constructing buildings. It has also brought him fame and fortune. He has visions of building a new utopic city called Megalopolis, but these plans bring him into conflict with New Rome's mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito.) The huge supporting cast includes Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia Laboeuf, Jon Voight, Talia Shire, Grace Vanderwaal and Dustin Hoffman.

Megalopolis has long been Coppola's passion project. After decades in development hell, he finally raised the money to self-finance the film by selling off part of his wine-making business. Yet it was not smooth-sailing from here.

Megalopolis had a troubled production from filming delays caused by the pandemic to Coppola's experimental style where he encouraged his cast to improvise scenes in theatre-style workshops. The visual effects and arts departments were either fired or resigned during production too.

All of this had a negative knock-on effect on Megalopolis. It was a pretentious, bloated, incomprehensible jumble of scenes with little to no plot. Coppola certainly wasn't short of ambition, but he couldn't convert that into a cohesive film. 

Inspired by the Catilinarian Conspiracy and the transition of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, Coppola tried modernising the story by transplanting it into a futuristic, science-fiction setting, but all this did was confuse things further. As well as being a trail-blazing architect, Cesar also had the power to stop time. Why? Because ... reasons.

I mentioned earlier that the visual effects and art departments were either fired or quit during the production. You could definitely see the end-result of that in the finished product, as the film looked incredibly inconsistent. Some parts like the cityscape from the top of Metropolis, but other parts looked like they were out of the worst acid trip ever. Did we really need to see Aubrey Plaza's face in a cup of tea? And as for the weird circus/gladitorial/Grace Vanderwaal show, that was just poor chaos. Not chaos in the good sense either. It was a confusing, overwhelming mess.

As for the acting, this matched the larger-than-life nature of the film. Driver, Esposito, Voight, Plaza and, especially, Laboeuf were dreadfully over-the-top. Granted the dialogue wasn't great - case-in-point, Voight talking about having a boner - but their performances were still so campy that it was difficult to take them seriously.

I really wanted to like Metropolis. The Godfather is one of my favourite films. Coppola is a titan of the film industry having also having also directed classics like Apocalypse Now. Yet he couldn't replicate that same success here. At eighty-years-old, this could very well be one of his last films. What a disappointing swansong. Never mind, Megalopolis. This was Megaflopolis.