Her name was Lola; she was a sheep. As Roberto Benigni's lascivious taxi driver confides in his incredulous fare, he wanted "something that moved, that looks you in the eye... something with a soul." After losing his virginity to a pumpkin, Lola was definitely a step in the right direction. Alas, his embarrassed father sold Lola to an "ugly, uneducated" butcher for 80,000 lire. "I felt so badly, I haven't eaten meat since." By the time he's confessed he's shagged his sister-in-law - her cotton panties reminded him of Lola's fleece - his passenger, a bishop (Bonacelli), is lying dead on the back seat from a shock-induced heart attack. It's 4am: what to do? <br /><br />Benigni's powerhouse performance is the high point of a film incorporating five different taxi rides, set during a single night in five cites. In Los Angeles, harried Victoria Snelling (Rowlands) thinks her sweary, tomboy driver Corky (Ryder, not so much chain-smoking as absorbing whole cigarette packets through osmosis) would be perfect for the film she's casting - only Corky turns her down.<br /><br />Over in New York, an East German clown-turned-cabbie (Mueller-Stahl) who doesn't know how to drive, teaches sceptical YoYo (Esposito) the virtue of patience. Meanwhile, in Paris, two outsiders - Béatrice Dalle's sharp-tongued blind girl and her sullen driver (De Bankolé), a victim of racial prejudice from the Ivory Coast, reach an understanding.<br /><br />That same night, in Rome, Benigni's cabbie talks his holy passenger to death while making his confession, and, in Helsinki, a laid-off industrial worker and his colleagues (Väänänen, Kuosmanen and Salmela) meet a taxi driver (Pellonpää) with rather more to be depressed about. Travis Bickle had it easy.<br /><br />We're in familiar Jarmusch territory here, with his recurring theme of loners reaching out to one another in the dead of night. And there's little delights to be found tucked away within these red-eyed meditations; not least Tom Waits' clanking score - evoking the ghosts of New Orleans and Kurt Weill via Captain Beefheart.<br /><br />Night On Earth isn't Jarmusch's best movie - despite some good turns from the cast, it's too uneven, and the weaker segments (Los Angeles, New York) could have been excised without any loss of quality or coherence. Not that the film follows any linear strictures (however inverted, as with the superior Mystery Train) or narrative arc: Jarmusch isn't interested in dealing a complete hand here - merely shuffling the deck around and plucking cards at random.<br /><br />The effect is rather like bolting through an exhibition of Edward Hopper paintings at high speed, half-glimpsed nighthawks on the periphery of vision. The whole film is redolent of a Tom Waits lyric from his classic 1985 album 'Rain Dogs': "I've seen it all. I've seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train."