Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (Open Road), a pounding, brutally realistic New York City action drama about living-on-the-ragged-edge paramedics.

It beats the shit out of you, this film, but in a way that you can’t help but admire. It’s a tough sit but a very high-quality one. The traumatized soul of lower-depths Brooklyn and the sad, ferociously angry residents who’ve been badly damaged in ways I’d rather not describe has never felt more in-your-face.

In terms of assaultive realism and gritty authenticity Black Flies matches any classic ’70s or ’80s New York City film you could mention…The French Connection, Serpico, Prince of the City, Q & A, Good Time, Across 110th Street.

And what an acting triumph for Sean Penn, who plays the caring but worn-down and throughly haunted Gene Rutkovsky, a veteran paramedic who bonds with and brings along Tye Sheridan‘s Ollie Cross, a shaken-up Colorado native who lives in a shitty Chinatown studio and is trying to get into medical school.

Rutkovsky is a great hardboiled character, and Penn has certainly taken the bull by the horns and delivered his finest performance since his Oscar-winning turns in Mystic River (’03) and Milk (’08).

And Sheridan is also damn good in this, his best film ever. His character eats more trauma and anxiety and suffers more spiritual discomfort than any rookie paramedic deserves, and you can absolutely feel everything that’s churning around inside the poor guy.

At first I thought this 120-minute film would be Bringing Out The Dead, Part 2, but Black Flies, which moves like an express A train and feels more like 90 minutes, struck me as harder and punchier than that 1999 Martin Scorsese film, which I didn’t like all that much after catching it 23 and 1/2 years ago and which I’ve never rewatched.

Yes, it’s one nerve-wracking traumatic event after another, and so it feels like a forced deck at times. And yes, it dive-bombs into a kind of too-sudden happy ending during the last 10 or 15. But this is one alive-on-the-planet-earth urban thriller that grips and holds and doesn’t let you go.

It’s obviously more of a guy film and certainly not for couples (I noticed at least four or five women journos bailing within the first 30 or 40 — an older woman sitting next to me walked out only about 20 minutes in), but by any brutal big-city standard it’s a wowser.

The excellent, go-for-broke supporting performances from Michael Pitt, Katherine Waterston, Mike Tyson and Raquel Nave are nothing to snort at either.

Based on Shannon Burke’s 2008 novel (\based upon Burke’s real-life experience as a paramedic) and written by Ryan King and Ben Mac Brown, Black Flies is totally balls to the wall.

Are you a fan of super-expensive, dutifully plotted, follow-the-formula, steady-as-she-goes tentpole reboots? The kind of flamboyant, highly energized, basically bullshit popcorn fantasies that most of us are cool with on occasion. And if not, do you at least feel a fondness for wackazoid, over-the-top, throw-out-the-rulebook, crazier-than-fuck endings? If so, you’ll most likely have a place in your heart for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney, 6.30), which I managed to see this morning at 8:30 am.

Does Dial of Destiny have a soul? Does it move and breathe with something other than mere technical expertise and the relative comfort of a massive budget? The answer is “yeah, kinda” in the sense that imagination-wise it jumps off a cliff at the very end, and that, in itself, constitutes a kind of agreeable, Jesus H. Christ craziness that only screenwriters who’ve done psychedelic drugs could have come up with. (The writers are Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and director James Mangold.)

I was obliged to sit in heaven (near the top of the Grand Lumiere balcony, which is angled at 45 degrees) and there was no leg room to speak of. For most of the 142-minute running time my knees were screaming. But I felt diverted and occasionally amused and…I don’t know, placated by this big, noisy, unsurprising, throughly whorish and very handsomely shot old-schooler — an imitation Steven Spielberg tentpole film that feels like it could have been made in 1992 or ’95 or ’01 if 2023-level CG had been available, and if 80-year-old Harrison Ford had been (duhh) 30 years younger, which wouldn’t have gotten in the way of anything plot-wise.

The pans that broke last night were written by soreheads. It is what it is, and it delivers the hand-me-down goods in a way that very few will find bothersome or underwhelming.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a mega-budget serving of silly, rousing, formulaic, high-energy, fuck-all Hollywood wankery. If you pay to see it with that understanding in mind, it’s “fun” as far it goes, largely, I would say, because it also feels oddly classy…a well-ordered, deliciously well-cut exercise in which Mangold does a better-than-decent job of imitating Spielberg’s psychology, discipline, camera placements, cutting style, easy-to-follow plotting and generally pleasing performances.

In his 5.18 review, Irish Times critic Donald Clarke writes that “nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favorably to the first three films.” He’s right about that, but it’s definitely better than 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That may not sound like much, I realize, but at least it has this distinction.

The plot is basically another “Indiana Jones vs. frosty, cold-blooded Nazi fiends in search of a priceless archeological artifact” thing. Ford is steady, restrained and solemnly earnest in a gruff (okay, grumpy-ass) sort of way. Mads Mikkelsen is the chief German baddy-waddy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is Indy’s younger half & partner in adventure and derring-do, Ethann Isidore is the new “Short Round” (the spunky Temple of Doom character, played by a young Ke Huy Quan) and so on.

One minor HE complaint: Waller-Bridge’s feisty-grifter character, Helena Shaw, is said to be the daughter of Toby Jones‘ Basil Shaw. There is, of course, no way on God’s good, green, chromosonal earth that the short, pudgy, gnome-like Jones (who stands 5’5″) could be the biological dad of the leggy, wafer-thin PWB (who stands just under 5’10”). No way in hell. I bought the crazy ending in a “is this really happening?” sort of way, but not this.

At 7:45 am, 150-200 people in a last-minute badge line for Indy 5. Those who read last night’s reviews are at least considering a charge that it’s not that good, and they don’t care. Neither do I. Obedient corporate brand slaves, all of us.

I would feel derelict if I didn’t at least try to see it.

11:10 am update: I got in because of a last-minute decision by festival staff to let journalists in first. Thanks, guys…appreciated.

And guess what? Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn’t half bad — it follows the template to the letter, doing the time-honored Indy dance in a completely predictable but nonetheless tolerable and certainly professional fashion, and it has a CRAZY-ASS ending that HE definitely won’t spoil.

From Robbie Collin’s Cannes review:

HE will try to catch it at 8:30 am tomorrow.

The presumption is that these four promotional documentaries will deliver the usual corporate gloss-over zoneout. What else are they gonna do?

Imagine all the fascinating material that won’t be included…truth-for-truth’s-sake stories that don’t necessarily enhance the stock value. I’d be there for that.

“Featuring insights and first-person stories from directors, actors, executives, journalists and historians, the four specials trace Warner Bros.’ underdog origins — from its founding in the early 1920s by four brothers from an immigrant family, through decades of creative risks and impactful storytelling, to the historic mergers of the 2000s that transformed the company into a global entertainment powerhouse.

“Directed by Leslie Iwerks with narration by Morgan Freeman and clips from iconic films and hit TV series, 100 Years of Warner Bros. offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look into the indelible stories that have spoken to audiences around the world for generations. The first two #WB100 documentaries stream May 25 on Max,” blah blah.

…is my next screening (5:30 pm), followed by a 10:45 pm showing of Jean-Stephane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies (paramedics tear-assing around Manhattan — Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan, Katherine Waterston, Michael Pitt, Mike Tyson).

This is just a taste of Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple/Paramount, 10.6) , but those luscious outdoor vistas (oil fields, burning homes at night) strike me as fairly magnificent. Too much conspicuous CG in the opening shot of the prairie natives. Leo’s hayseed accent reminds me of his Howard Hughes voice from The Aviator. Somehow the idea of a plump Leo and the mid 30ish Lily Gladstone playing a married couple…I’m not sure what to do with this. Jesse Plemons and Brendan Fraser are barely seen.

Thoughts, impressions, intuitions?

The big Cannes press screening happens almost exactly 48 hours hence (Saturday, 5.20, 4:30 pm).

Verbatim message to Cannes cohabitants with identities deleted, sent this morning: In lieu of last night’s SNORING DISASTER, which resulted in my getting roughly two and a half hours of sleep (if that) and my sleeping through roughly 40% of section #1 of Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, the important…nay, vital thing is to isolate [the snore bear] from [the other two residents] as much as possible.

This is what occasionally happens when you’re poor and are forced to share festival accommodations. You’ll sometimes lose lots of sleep because one of your flatmates is a bit of a sociopath in the sense that he regards snoring as something that can be endured or brushed away (it CAN’T be!), and the sounds that come out of this guy are nothing but agony from the first night on.

I’ve been through two or three difficult snoring situations at Sundance but I’ve never before experienced a snoring assault of this magnitude. Sawing, growling, snorting, rattling the china. Once it takes hold in your mind you can’t get rid of it. Having to endure this aural horror every night is going to absolutely RUIN my Cannes experience. It’s intolerable, and I’m really and truly furious at what [snore bear] is doing to us.

Remedy #1: [Snore bear] sleeps on the living room couch, from [the other two] sleep in the bedroom, which is separated by two doors.

Remedy #2: Everyone needs to buy a set of extra-effective ear plugs at a pharmacy.

Remedy #3: [Snore bear] needs to buy some kind of anti-snoring remedy or device at a pharmacy. This is the LEAST he can do. A wooden clothes pin that clasps upon his nose, say.

Remedy #4: Early this morning I went searching through the building for some kind of storage or basement utility room that [snore bear] could sleep in. Alas, I found nothing but little car garages.

I reluctantly sat down this morning with Steve McQueen‘s Occupied City, a doc about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II and the various oppressions, suppressions and terrors that arose from this. “Reluctantly” because I’d read that McQueen’s film is a bit of a tough one or, in the words of Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, “a trial to sit through.” It seemed at the very least unworthy of a four-hour-plus investment. Maybe.

I was nonetheless ready to engage, and I can at least report that I didn’t hate it. Given the historical aspect you might presume that McQueen would be using troves of digitally enhanced archival footage from the war years, but it was all shot during the pandemic of ’20 and ’21, and in vivid color inside a boxy (1.37:1) aspect ratio, and overflowing with Amsterdam capturings.

It’s based upon “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a purportedly exacting coffee-table book by McQueen’s wife Bianca Stigter, and it’s basically one fixed-tripod tableau after another of Amsterdam, augmented or expanded upon by narration (read by Melanie Hyams) about this or that dark anecdote or tale about Jewish residents of that Dutch city who were persecuted or hid in attics or were eventually murdered in concentration camps. But it feels awfully dry and rote and static, I can tell you. It’s not boring or uninvolving but a bit flat, but within 12 or 15 minutes I was muttering to myself “this is it?”

McQueen’s basic idea (hold on, it’s a lulu) is that the bureaucratic repression of the Covid years, which we all felt pained and smothered by in more ways than one, and the deeply injurious Amsterdam restrictions, suffocations and violations of the early to mid 1940s are somehow related. Or, you know, not dissimilar.

This is what the film keeps saying over and over, that we’re all living in the now but that the past is still with us (and isn’t even “the past”, heh-heh) and lingering in our hearts and souls and all that. It’s a strange concept but I went with it, and I certainly came to know the various neighborhoods and bridges and weathered buildings and town squares of Amsterdam look like these days, much more than ever before, I mean, and I’ve been to Amsterdam, mind. Too many British pubs, too many party boys.

But I have to be honest and admit that my eyelids didn’t make it all the way through. I’m blaming this not on myself but on a certain fellow I’m sharing the apartment with, and more particularly his grizzly bear-snoring…make that his Steven Spielberg T-Rex snoring. (More on this in subsequent story.)

McQueen’s film includes an intermission, and it’s finally time to fulfill the promise of the above headline and state that the musical entr’acte interlude between parts one or two is truly, oddly moving. In a liturgical sense. I loved just sitting there and letting it sink in. It made me feel oddly happy, and also persuaded me that there might be something deeper to Occupied City…something that i wasn’t paying sufficient attention to. But I let that notion go.

You can’t trust any major action or fantasy franchise (John Wick abominations, endless Fast flicks, any Marvel or D.C. torpedo) to depict the dying of this or that character with any finality. That’s because they don’t respect death. They mostly regard death and serious physical injury as a speed bump, a plot detour, something to fiddle or fuck with until an apparently dead character comes back to life.

I’ve been complaining about this for years, but most critics and columnists have stayed away from such criticisms. Which is why Variety‘s Peter Debruge deserves respect for the following passage in his Fast X review:

“There are explosive scenes in Brazil, Portugal, Los Angeles and Antarctica, all of which seem to be a five-minute commute from one another. While Vin Diesel’s Dom spends much of the movie trying to protect his 8-year-old son (Leo Abelo Perry), a whole bunch of beloved long-timers wind up ‘dying,’ although these movies have shown such a flexible understanding of mortality (not to mention physics and plausibility) that it doesn’t make sense to mourn them just yet.”

And this: “Every race needs a finish line. For the Fast & Furious franchise, the studio keeps shoving it farther down the road, at least according to Diesel, who suggested at the world premiere of the 10th installment — a brainless but action-packed thrill ride billed as Fast X — that Universal might split the ‘finale’ over three movies. Why not seven? Or 20 more, for that matter?

“While Hollywood’s highest-octane franchise shows no signs of slowing, it was crazy reckless to give the green light to such a clunker.”

I’m sorry but I’ve never been a fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda, the humanist, kind-hearted, Ozu-like Japanese director whom everyone (i.e., the Cannes mob) admires. I “respect” his signature focus (sad, anxious, troubled families going through difficult times), but his films (Shoplifters, Broker, Like Father, Like Son) have always bored my pants off.

Which means, of course, that I don’t like Kore-era’s humanism…right? I know I’ve always found his stories frustrating because they seem to just go on and on.

I certainly felt this way during today’s Salle Debussy screening of his latest film, Monster, which deals with school bullying, repressed rage and various family misunderstandings.

It struck me as repetitive and meandering and lacking in narrative discipline. I began to feel antsy after the first hour, and then this feeling seemed to double-down. My soul was screaming during the final half-hour of this 125-minute film, which felt more like three hours. I was silently whimpering.

I’m not condemning Monster or calling it a bad film. I’m just saying the world of Kore-era is not for me, and never will be. This doesn’t make me a bad person, or so I’m telling myself. I know that at the 95-minute mark I leaned over and muttered to a friend, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”