About Defacto Film Reviews

An impressively skillful performance by both Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan provides some riveting emotional depth for Maestro, a stylized, conventional, and uneven biopic of the late Leonard Bernstein. While showcasing some orchestral scenes with [...]

Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos's adoration for surrealist aesthetics and edgy material is apparent once again in Poor Things, this time showing a fascination for silent movie aesthetics and highly stylized artificial settings with racy themes [...]

After the release of the brilliant The Wind Rises in 2013, legendary director Hayao Miyazaki announced that he was retiring from work on feature-length films. After a 30-plus year career filled with visionary works of imagination, it [...]

A surrealist satire that takes a lot of aim in its commentary doesn't always rise to the occasion, but it draws some rich ideas about our modern meme culture. Very much in the vein of [...]

Perhaps Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki's (The Man Without a Past, Le Havre) simplest film of his 40-year career, an amusing and bittersweet seriocomedy, Fallen Leaves breaks no ground; it's executed like his other films, but [...]

Surprisingly, the legendary historical figure Napoleon Bonaparte has never had a historical Hollywood epic, and the grandiose new epic Napoleon doesn't live up to the potential this story has to offer. Despite some stunning battle [...]

The transition from childhood into the teenage years can be among the most turbulent years of a person’s life. Thoughts, actions, and relationships change, and kids often feel alone during this time. Even those with [...]

The massive undisclosed mansion at and around Drayton House, Northamptonshire, is the stage for desire, imitation, and obsession in Saltburn, the sophomore feature by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman). Though even more [...]

Mostly a film about performance and partly about identity, Todd Hayes's May December is quite a fascinating film on many levels. An artful, rangy, and engrossing psychological drama that merges elements of melodrama, wry humor, [...]

Plagued with anger, embarrassment, and the inability to coach a team to the World Cup, Dutch American soccer coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) is given the ultimatum of being fired from his position as a [...]

As film appreciation has continued to grow in the last few decades or so, in part due to Blu-Rays, DVDs, and streaming, which have spawned social media film cultures and bubbles, you can now spot [...]

What at first looks like a recognizable coming-of-age indie that echoes the social realism of a Ken Loach movie ends up taking some very uneven detours in Charlotte Regan's mediocre first feature, Scrapper. A tale [...]

Based on the remarkable and nearly impossible biographical true story of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad's persistent efforts to swim straight from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage, Nyad, the latest Netflix sports movie, is [...]

An inspiring teacher seeks to switch up traditional teaching methods for himself and his troubled students, only to find that there are many roadblocks set against his good intentions. Persistence for needed change is the [...]

A deeply humane and fully sustained absorption in loneliness, grief, world history, and philosophy, along with frequent quarrels between a history instructor and a small group of New England boarding school students The Holdovers marks [...]