75
A thrilling, subjective, portrait of one family’s attempts to navigate the corrupt economy of emergency health care while, also, providing much-needed services for a city desperately in need of EMTs.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Los Angeles Times by Carlos Aguilar
What’s indelible in this visceral chronicle is that more than profiting from human suffering, the Ochoas fill the gaps of economic inequality while doing good without reservation.
75
It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Though its micro view limits its usefulness in big discussions of public policy — it's easy to imagine American partisans using it as evidence both for and against government-run health care — it is a vivid reminder that all such policies are lived out by millions of individuals, who die every day when things aren't well run.
80
It’s a very exciting, sad, yet extremely funny film.
100
RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz
This is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success."
100
Midnight Family is both a compassionate portrait of a working-class family and a frightening ride through a broken healthcare system that risks the lives of both patients and providers like the Ochoa family.
90
Portraits of institutional dysfunction don’t come much more urgent, and quietly bleak, than this.
75
Director Luke Lorentzen (“New York Cuts”) puts us in the front seat of the Med Care van staffed by the men of the Ochoa family, freelance entrepreneurs trying to feed and care for a big family from inside an ambulance. Their story has thrills and compassion, hard luck and grief.
83
The A.V. Club by Vikram Murthi
To his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery.