About Defacto Film Reviews

Sentimental and manipulative would be the inevitable criticism of Tótem if writer-director Lila Avilés second dramatic feature were a Hollywood studio-driven movie. Luckily, it isn't, though the set-up has all the markings of tugging at your [...]

The hitman may be the most overused figure in cinema, particularly in contrast to what hired killers turn out to be in the news stories we really hear about, who are rare and often brutish [...]

Films about colonialism and settlers overtaking Western land are often in Western movies, and they most often come up with white protagonists who side with the oppressed Indigenous people, and they combat against the oppressors. [...]

There has always been a lot of passion and perspective for filmmaker Ava DuVernay; there is no denying that she has always crafted films about essential issues that tie our past with the present. She [...]

Freud’s Last Session, the new film from director Matt Brown (2015’s The Man Who Knew Infinity) occupies a strange filmic space. Like Brown’s previous film, it is based on real life characters. But whereas The Man Who [...]

Taking a more dramatic approach than having the same old routine narrative of astronauts discovering threatening extraterrestrial life and dying off slowly, I.S.S. deserves some praise for coming up with creative ways in its refreshing [...]

The biblical epic was a Hollywood mainstay decades ago, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s. The genre has largely fallen out of favor, with religious films now largely the province of small-scale dramas and [...]

Four Daughters is promptly proving how layered and experimental documentaries can be. Documentarian Kouther Ben Hania's latest docu-fiction merges documentary with reenactments in this engrossing story about femininity and family in crisis in Tunisia. It's [...]

The true story of the survivors of the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash over the Andes mountains has been translated into film before, most notably in the 1993 Ethan Hawke starring film Alive. While the remarkable [...]

With handsome production values and good intentions, The Boys in the Boat is George Clooney's earnest but bland historical sports drama about the University of Washington rolling team that competed for gold in the 1936 [...]

With some sharp writing, timely social commentary, and a wrenching performance by German actress Leonie Benesch, there are many reasons to embrace The Teachers' Lounge, a debut feature by İlker Çatak, who wrote it with [...]