Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's "Asphalt City" is a film that injects its nearly nonstop intensity into the the veins of the audience from the first shot. The director sees the darker side of the New York City night as a whacked-out boulevard of death awash in the pulsating red lights of the ambulances, cop cars, and fire engines that cut through the detritus of the city.

Tye Sheridan is Ollie Cross, a rookie paramedic in his first few weeks on the job. Working on his MCAT in the hope of being a doctor. Ollie rides in an ambulance all over the East New Yor

In “Black Flies” the full-frontal reality of two nighttime paramedics grabs you at the throat and doesn’t let go. The new Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire film is an infernal ride of double-shifts and bullying and death into the belly of the beast, the film pops, hits hard, the image is jumpy, the screams are loud, it’s a pressure-cooker, I came out of there traumatized and a little shaken. This is not the New York City I know. Had an inkling.

Who is Billy Moore? He's a British citizen who was caught heroin while in Thailand and sent to jail, only to emerge a boxing champion. A white male, who gets thrown in jail while sojourning in a completely foreign country and walks out of there a boxing champion makes for the kind of extraordinary, by-the-bootstraps survival story that screenwriters are hardly able to generate. As it were, "A Prayer Before Dawn" is adapted from a book that Moore

Is social media a waste of time, as David Remnick said? Maybe so. But Twitter, Instagram and the rest make keeping up with other people's lives easy and free. Where the Cannes festivalgoer is concerned, a spur-of-the-moment video on Instagram by a filmmaker can potentially add insight into what they're experiencing. At the same time, it's important not to lose touch of the fact that social media is often as vapid as it is useless