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Review.

Jim Jarmusch, says the publicity, "resists the notion that his films are necessarily becoming more conventional." In rhetoric this is called prolepsis--anticipating an argument with a prior response. Jarmusch's new film Night on Earth (Fine Line) explains why he may be uneasy. I can't comment on "necessarily" in the quotation above, but certainly Night on Earth departs from the heterodoxy of Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train. Those taciturn films seemed to hover around their people, rather than enclose them; they not only dealt with offbeat subjects, they implicitly mocked the way conventional filmmakers might have handled those subjects. Not so Night on Earth.

Its very form is a formula. We catch the glint of the cookie-cutter as we recall earlier uses of the pattern. In this case, it's five sequences with five taxi drivers in five cities around the United States and Europe. In If I Had a Million, 1932 (to name just one), there are several episodes in each of which someone is suddenly handed a million dollars.

Qualms are not calmed by Jarmusch's first shot, a globe rotating in space, followed by a close-up of a map that we move across to the first locale, Los Angeles. A small light goes on in the map when we get there. Additionally, we see a bank of five clocks showing the time in our five prospective settings. (This whole process is repeated between episodes.) We want to hope that Jarmusch is kidding with all this corn. But he isn't.

The five sequences--sketches, really--do add up to a technical challenge: how to shoot a lot of scenes inside taxis and yet avoid visual tedium. This challenge Jarmusch meets well enough, but the very fact that he set himself this challenge is itself a move toward a more head-on, less oblique form of filming. The closest that the film comes to heterodoxy is in the shapes of the sketches: none of them builds to a conventional payoff. But then none of them is markedly affecting even in a sidewise, eccentric way.

In L.A. an actors' agent (Gena Rowlands) takes a taxi, is struck by the character and look of her driver (Winona Ryder), and offers to make her a star; but the driver says her ambition is to be a mechanic. In New York the driver is an East German immigrant (Armin Mueller-Stahl) who gets involved with his black passenger (Giancarlo Esposito) and his sister-in-law (Rosie Perez), both of them linguistically sulfurous, and the driver chuckles his way to greater knowledge of his new country. The third sketch, in Paris, is about a driver from the Ivory Coast (Isaach de Bankole); he picks up a blind young woman (Beatrice Dalle) who soon trashes his compassion. In Rome a driver (Roberto Benigni of Down by Law) has a priest as a passenger and insists on confessing as he drives--with dire effect on the priest. The last sketch is in Helsinki: a driver picks up three workmen who have been carousing to anesthetize the anguish of one of the group, just fired. The driver tells them of his own woes and shames them into silence.

Two performances are outstanding. Benigni is outstandingly skilled, an experienced stand-up comic (here sitting down) who knows how to entertain. Rowlands is outstandingly amateurish, as usual, a woman nerving herself up to appear at ease but who never quite makes it.

Frederick Elmes, previously a cinematographer for David Lynch, shot this film in excellent color, from the late afternoon of L.A. to the wintry dawn in Helsinki. But what's a Jarmusch film doing in excellent color? No one would want to confine Jarmusch to repeating his first films, but when he changes, we hope to see him changing, not a new and lesser man taking over. If the young Godard had signed with 20th Century-Fox, a picture like Night on Earth might have been the result.

In Russian "raspad" means "collapse." Raspad (MK2) is the title of Mikhail Belikov's film about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Belikov is a Ukrainian who lives in Kiev, seventy miles from Chernobyl, and he's an experienced filmmaker: Raspad was the logical result of both facts. While the film was being shot in 1989, an American film person visiting Kiev became interested; through him, all the post-production work was done at George Lucas's facilities in California.

By now everyone knows that we will never know the whole story of Chernobyl--why it happened, what its full effects were then and later, what its even later effects will be. But knowing that we will never know is, in itself, knowing enough--enough for unshakable chill. Belikov is out to frighten us further, and the best aspect of his film is that he succeeds, both in his re-creation of the accident and of his government's efforts to suppress or minimize the news.

The weaker parts of Raspad are the fictional elements that Belikov and his co-writer, Oleg Prihodko, have woven around the cataclysm. For instance, a Kiev journalist returns from a trip to find that his wife has been unfaithful; the shock of this discovery is poised against the disaster, which occurs at the same time. More, this story begins and ends with stock Russian (or Ukrainian) sequences in which sodden people sit around a dinner table, listening to a mournful song while they contemplate their souls.

Only one of the fictional strands has power. A pair of newlyweds steal away from their wedding party and motorcycle off to a forest where they spend a blissful night in a tent, then wake in the morning to see men in protective outfits stalking through the woods and putting up a contamination-warning sign.

But the factual matters are horrific, much more so than the American films and TV shows about nuclear disaster, because Raspad is about something that actually happened. Besides the explosions and flames and immediate deaths, Belikov lays in terrible touches: an oceanic mass of frightened people (5,000 extras) in the Kiev railway station; a helicopter flight over the city of Pripyat where most of the Chernobyl workers lived, one high-rise apartment project after another, all utterly deserted.

The arguments in favor of nuclear energy are familiar and, as arguments, are reasonable. The traditional energy sources are limited, more expensive, and carry their own environmental hazards. But human error, not exactly eliminated in the nuclear age, entails quite different results in nuclear plants. A recent "Nightline" program discussed the sorry safety conditions in many Eastern European nuclear energy plants--without assuming that such plants elsewhere, though better built and monitored, are risk-free. That program, Raspad, Chernobyl itself underscore that there is no such thing as a "national" nuclear accident.