Five taxi films you should watch

If you are looking for taxi films to watch, these five are the essentials: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991), The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997), Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998) and Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004). In all of them the taxi is much more than a backdrop: it is where the story happens and the reason characters who would never have met cross paths.

They are very different films: a cult drama, a comedy set in five cities, science fiction, French-style action and a night-time thriller. That is why they work well as a season: each one shows a different way of telling what happens inside a taxi. Below you have the quick facts and, after that, what to expect from each title.

1. Taxi Driver (1976)

It is the taxi film par excellence and one of the great American films of the seventies. Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a veteran who cannot sleep and takes the night shift in a New York cab. From the driver's seat he watches a city that disgusts him, and that gaze becomes more and more dangerous. It was written by Paul Schrader, scored by Bernard Herrmann, features a very young Jodie Foster and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Its mirror scene, with the famous “You talkin’ to me?”, is part of popular culture.

Why watch it: because the taxi is a portrait of the character. Travis lives inside the car, and the windscreen is his way of looking at the world. It is a hard film, violent in its final stretch, and not one for every occasion.

2. Night on Earth (1991)

Jim Jarmusch brings together five stories that take place on the same night in five taxis in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki. Each episode is a conversation between driver and passenger, in a tone that ranges from comedy to melancholy. The cast includes Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Giancarlo Esposito, Béatrice Dalle and Roberto Benigni, whose Rome episode is one of the best remembered. The soundtrack is by Tom Waits.

Why watch it: it is the one that best captures what is special about a taxi, a small space where two strangers share some time and sometimes tell each other things they would not tell anyone else.

3. The Fifth Element (1997)

Luc Besson imagines a future New York full of flying cars, where Bruce Willis is Korben Dallas, a former soldier who makes his living as a taxi driver. His routine is blown apart when a mysterious young woman, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich), literally falls into his taxi. From then on it is adventure, humour and a visual design that is still very recognisable.

Why watch it: it is the lightest option on the list and the easiest to watch as a group. The chase through the air traffic is one of the most spectacular taxi scenes in cinema.

4. Taxi (1998)

Produced and written by Luc Besson and directed by Gérard Pirès, this French action comedy follows Daniel, a speed-obsessed Marseille taxi driver who ends up helping a rather clumsy police officer, Émilien, chase a gang of robbers. Its success led to several sequels and an American remake.

Why watch it: for pure entertainment. The taxi, a car modified with more than one trick up its sleeve, is almost another character, and the chases through the streets of Marseille are the main reason to press play.

5. Collateral (2004)

Michael Mann shuts two men inside a taxi for one night in Los Angeles. Max (Jamie Foxx) is a meticulous taxi driver who dreams of starting his own business; Vincent (Tom Cruise), the passenger who gets into his car and forces him to drive from one job to the next, turns out to be a hitman. The tension builds from stop to stop while the city, almost always at night, is seen through the windows.

Why watch it: it is the best example of how a taxi can become a trap. Much of the film is conversation between driver and passenger, and it works just as well as the action scenes.

If you want to put together a small season, there are two ways of organising it:

• By release date: from Taxi Driver to Collateral you can see how the way of filming the city at night changes over almost thirty years of cinema.
• By tone: start with The Fifth Element and Taxi, which are pure entertainment, continue with Night on Earth and leave the two most intense, Collateral and Taxi Driver, for last.

A double bill that works very well is Taxi Driver and Collateral: two lonely taxi drivers, two cities at night and two opposite ways of reacting to violence. If what interests you is the driver as a character rather than the car, in our round-up of the best films about taxi drivers you will find other titles, including two Spanish ones.

The list could be much longer. These titles are not “taxi films” in the strict sense, or are less well known, but the taxi carries real weight in them:

• Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015): the director himself drives a taxi around Tehran and films his passengers with a dashboard camera. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale.
• A Taxi Driver (Jang Hoon, 2017): a South Korean film inspired by real events, about a Seoul taxi driver who takes a foreign journalist to Gwangju in 1980.
• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988): its outlandish Madrid taxi is one of the best-loved supporting characters in Spanish cinema.

Why taxis appear so often on screen, which scenes keep coming back and what that has to do with New York cinema is explained in our article on the taxi in cinema. And if the image of the yellow cab stays with you, here we look at the most recognisable taxis on the planet.

Fortunately, real-life taxis bear little resemblance to these films. No chases, no dangerous passengers, no flying cars: the norm is a quiet journey and, every now and then, a good conversation. That said, the taxi is still a place where stories are told, as we show in the loveliest stories that happen in a taxi.

If you are going to the cinema in Madrid, the Gran Vía and the plaza de Callao are still the great showcase for new releases, and getting around the centre by taxi saves you looking for parking afterwards. You can see how we work in the area on our taxi in Gran Vía page. And if the trip is to the airport, the journey from anywhere inside the M-30 has a fixed fare of €33; the other zones are under our airport fares. On the way back, the terminal pickup is arranged with your flight number.