I’m still really angry at those Cannes critics who dismissed or otherwise pooh-poohed Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire‘s Black Flies. It’s nothing phenomenal or earth-shattering, but is bruisingly efficient and sufficiently good for what it is — a jarring, hard-hitting, you-are-there NYC paramedic trauma film.
Black Flies occupies the same general atmospheric turf as Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99), which of course was critically praised because critics know they’re obliged to give any Scorsese film the benefit of the doubt and then some.
If Scorsese had never made Bringing Out The Dead but had produced and/or collaborated to some extent on Black Flies, Cannes critics — almost all of them fickle, posturing snobs — would have been much more supportive.
