After months and months of floundering around in distribution purgatory, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies has finally landed a theatrical release date — Friday, 3.29.

Except it’s now being called Asphalt City.

John Huston‘s The Asphalt Jungle (’50) was a cooler title.

Exhaustion, screeching brakes, sudden jolts and grubby walk-up apartments, sirens, raw aromas and in-your-face whatevers.

I saw Black Flies in Cannes last May (nine months ago), and have written about it three or four times since.

“Black Flies Punches Through,” posted on 5.23.23:

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.

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“The eccentrics are really the only real critics these days. There are so many formerly respectable, self-styled film gurus who’ve just laid down and accepted their hackdom in the last decade. For anyone who prefers serious criticism, the nutters are all we have.” — comment about August 2010 article titled “Nutter Critics.”

It’s still true today. The only critics you can actually trust in January 2024 are the ones who aren’t on the take and are basically running on their own helium gas or spirit fuel. So who are the crazy good guys in today’s realm? Hollywood Elsewhere, of course, but who else?

Posted on 8.23.10: “Nutters are made, not born,” I wrote in 2003. “I’m kind of one myself, but I didn’t start out this way. I came into this racket as a relatively sane, even-tempered youth, wanting only to be spelled and lifted up by those wonderfully crafted confections I’d first seen as a child on late-night TV. Now look at me — delighted by those 20 or 25 movies each year that ring my critical bell, but most of the time oozing acid cynicism and choking from the residue of a thousand crappy films released over the Hollywood downturn period of the last 22 or 23 years.

“You could subject St. Francis of Assisi to the same experience, and at the end of the road he’d be a film critic version of Kirk Douglas‘s character in Ace in the Hole, or else a complete junket-whore sellout.

“One way of not giving in to a Douglas attitude is to isolate and perhaps over-praise any film that comes along that seems the least bit unusual or distinctive. Then, at least, you have something to root for.

“There are two kinds of nutter film critics — the good (i.e., scrappy, finger-poking, irreverent) and the bad (lazy, smarmy, go-alonger). But ask around about the nutters who irritate or tick people off the most, as I did last weekend, and you’ll find that most of them ignore the softies and take aim at the rarified elite. I guess it’s always the oddball malcontents in any society who get singled out for punishment.

“‘Good’ nutters may irritate people, yes, for their high-horse pans of movies many of us have enjoyed or loved, or for their praising of movies that only they and other nutters have seen at European film festivals, but at the end of the day their occasional support of obscure filmmakers and a general willingness to buck the popular tide obviously lives up to the job description of ‘film critic’, and is obviously better for us culturally than not.

“Whereas the easy lays who give passes and sometimes raves to big-studio dreck and whose pulses invariably race at the prospect of taking home another goodie bag…well, fill in the blank.

The leading good nutters, according to a poll that resulted in 30-something responses (i.e., extremely unscientific), were N.Y. Press critic Armond White and the then-L.A. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Runner-ups included, in alphabetical order, included Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman, Variety‘s Robert Koehler, the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum, the San Diego Reader‘s Duncan Shepard, and then-New Times critic Luke Y. Thompson.

You may have heard that most many film critics are politically subservient cowards and whores…obsequious lapdogs…damp-finger-to-the-wind weather vanes…dweebs who write within an elitist, self-regarding bubble and pretty much for each other…they wouldn’t dare admit to an honest Joe or Jane Popcorn emotion about anything.

Jacob Savage has conveyed all this and more in a 1.29.24 Tablet piece called “The Unbearable Fakeness of Film Reviews“.

“Popular film and television criticism once functioned primarily as an engine of recommendation and secondarily as a means of social and artistic commentary,” Savage writeds. “Increasingly it serves as neither. Lacking secure jobs or professional stature, and existing at the whims of politicized online mobs, today’s movie critics are the opposite of tart-tongued predecessors like Pauline Kael, Vincent Canby and Janet Maslin. Instead of priding themselves on their willingness to stand up for art against the variable tastes of consumers and studios alike, they surrender to the pack.”

It’s definitely not welcome news that departing Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang is joining The New Yorker as its senior film critic, or at least as a co-senior bigmouth with Richard Brody (i.e., “the Armond White of the far left”).

Chang is a brilliant, first-rate critic who has passed along many valuable judgments and perceptions over the years. But over the past six or seven annums he’s become a bit of a social justice warrior (at least in my eyes) and something of an identity ideologue. Example: Last October Chang panned The Holdovers over a single depiction of racist cruelty between two minor characters.

The Chang hire means two things, and both are breaking my heart.

One, The New Yorker film desk is now doubly woked-up and, in my opinion, half-fanatical. I’ve been an occasional fan of Brody’s essays, but there’s no forgetting that in his 10.13.22 Tar review he actually doubted the existence of wokeism and cancel culture. That, good sir, is fanaticism.

And two, New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, hired by Tina Brown 31 years ago and one of my absolute favorite wordsmith smart-asses ever since, has been kicked upstairs by editor David Remnick.

Lane will be “expanding to writing [on] a wider range of topics,” Remnick has announced — a polite way of saying that Lane’s senior stripes have been torn off.

This is not the end of my online New Yorker subscription, but Remnick is downgrading and more or less humiliating one of the very few non-woke (or mostly non-woke) critics of a senior status. Not cool and rather shitty in fact.

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For the rest of my moviegoing life I’m going to be stuck with Paul Mescal. Shackled to, besieged by. He’s obviously not going away. My soul aches, churns.

I’m slightly terrified…okay, that’s harsh. I’m certainly concerned about having to watch Mescal’s William Shakespeare, particularly during a tragic episode shared with wife Anne Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) over the death of their 11 year-old son, Hamnet.

Chloe Zhao, the celebrated Nomadland Oscar-winner who suffered brand damage from the generally despised Eternals, will direct.

McDormand, Portman, Blanchett, Lawrence, Collette, Witherspoon…that’s it, just these six. Okay, Morton makes seven.

…life wouldn’t have a great deal of meaning. Okay, it would obviously deliver a certain amount on its own weight and steam, but movies bring it all into focus, if you catch my drift.

This may be the greatest George Lucas quote I’ve ever read. It makes me even more sorry that he’s worn so many godawful flannel shirts.

From Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s “Hollywood: The Oral History” (‘22).

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…but this is an interesting photo, and saying this doesn’t make me a terrible person. And look at those hands.

…and probably best forgotten.

A World of Reel commenter named “M” has nailed the basic problem with Leonardo DiCaprio’s dumb-as-a-fencepost Ernest Burkhart character:

Yes, that’s 100% correct. Texas FBI guy Tom White should have been the main character.