Despite the director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire throwing everything at the screen, the star is frequently sublime in a brutal and unrelenting film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 22, 2024

Grabs you by the throat about four or five times, but then you got all that other space, where we gotta talk about our feelings.

| Apr 5, 2024

I found this gloomy, gloomy, gloomy, and it made me sad because I like Tye Sheridan as an actor. This movie isn't doing him any favors.

| Apr 5, 2024

Sometimes maximum intensity doesn’t yield optimal results.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 29, 2024

[The main characters'] dynamic is familiar at best and dull at worst, particularly for those who long ago tired of the tragedies of toxic machismo.

| Mar 28, 2024

Not for one second, not for one frame, does director Jean Stéphane’s bruising and bloody New York City drama thriller drive even near the neighborhood of subtlety. This is a stark, pitch-black, violent and gruesome waking nightmare of a story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 27, 2024

If you cannot tolerate violence and gore, then "Asphalt City" will be a very hard watch. But it is worth seeing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 27, 2024

Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 26, 2024

Despite a predictable arc, right down to the heartbreaking climax which one can see coming, there’s an emotional tug that appeals to one’s own deepest insecurities about loss...

| Jun 8, 2023

Sean Penn is terrific as Rutkovsky, the older man with a fraught personal life and a solid professional ethic.

| May 30, 2023

he movie, for all its grungy surface authenticity, is a bit of a fake. It’s turning the lives of parademics into something far darker and more amoral than they really are.

| May 21, 2023

You can practically smell the director chain-smoking behind the camera, muttering about spitting in the face of humanity.

| May 19, 2023

By the end, Black Flies leaves the viewer battered, bruised and bleeding out on the sidewalk, but never fully captivated.

| May 19, 2023

Arrestingly grim, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s corpses-and-all look at the life of a rookie first responder is a scuzzyily compelling ride.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2023

Black Flies is simply trading on old ideas.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 18, 2023

Black Flies is such an unrelentingly bleak look inside the busted gut of the American healthcare system that its posturing honesty soon curdles into something that’s hard to believe.

| Original Score: C- | May 18, 2023