About Defacto Film Reviews
Defacto Film Reviews is a unique site where the film critics are also filmmakers themselves. It will feature weekly reviews as well as lists and more.
Originally formed in 2002 under Defactoweb.com, our website’s chief film critic is Robert Joseph Butler. His top ten lists were featured under Movie City News. His reviews have also been published at Michigan Movie Magazine and on Michigan’s longest running film school website, MPIFilm.com.
He later went on to to become an award-winning filmmaker of several independent short films including such festival hits as The Spirit of Isabel and Within, which won the Audience Choice Award at the 2015 Cinetopia International Film Festival.
Using grassroots support, the site is devoted to celebrating independent and art-house cinema, as well as to high-crafted films that tell engaging stories with vision, focus, and skill.
Defacto Film Reviews is a unique case where the film critics are also filmmakers themselves. We will give readers comprehensible, honest, and erudite analysis of each film.
Duck, You Sucker (Spotlight Review) 50th Anniversary!
The Best Film of 1971!! Sergio Leone's final western, the 1971 saga "Duck You Sucker," also known as "A Fistful of Dynamite" is a triumphant masterpiece that features perhaps the most stellar casting, composing, set [...]
Malcolm & Marie
Malcolm (John David Washington), an up-and-coming film director, and his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya) a former actress, return home late after a successful film premiere. Off the high of strong buzz and acclaim, Malcolm feels on [...]
The Little Things
A neo-noir crime thriller about a serial killer that terrifies female victims in Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley, The Little Things, writer-director John Lee Hancock's latest film is of course a taut and psychological [...]
Little Fish
Morris from America, director Chad Hartigan utilizes small resources of his science-fiction genre piece to explore the themes of love, loss, memory, and disease. His third feature Little Fish is very ambitious, grounded in an intimate [...]
Defacto Film Reviews Presents: Soldiers of Cinema Podcast EP. 1
DeFacto Film Reviews presents: The Soldiers of Cinema Podcast. A monthly discussion of important classic and contemporary films, and those who made them. Join filmmakers Jake O'Brien, Robert Joseph Butler, and film critic Noah Damron [...]
Sundance Film Festival 2021 Coverage: Day Two
Day two of our Sundance 2021 coverage includes review for I Was a Simple Man, John and the Hole and In the Earth. Keep checking throughout the week for more reviews. I Was a Simple [...]
Sundance Film Festival 2021 Coverage: Day One
With this year's Sundance Film Festival taking place virtually, we were able to "attend" the festival this year. Throughout each day of Sundance, we'll give you reviews of all the films we see each day. [...]
Review Round Up 1/27
This past month has been quite busy over here on DeFacto, and there were quite a few films we weren't able to make time for. So to make up for the lack of time, here's [...]
Film About a Father Who
Families hold many complexities and dysfunctions. Stories are often passed on from person to person, and many times it leads to siblings, mothers, fathers, and other members to feel bitter, but it can also be [...]
The White Tiger
Ramin Bahrani's screen version of Arvind Adiga's best-selling novel is certainly hit-or-miss, a visceral, tragic melodrama that plods along with many sudden tonal shifts from scene to scene, while leaving some emotional pull, the film [...]
Locked Down
Timely but implausible, stylish but inconsistent, Doug Liman's "Locked Down" is a modernist narrative that's setting is during the early stages of the COVID-19 lock down, an amalgam of many tonal shifts: screwball comedy, modern [...]
The Best Films of 2020 – Noah Damron
2020 was unquestionably the most difficult year for us as a collective whole. Through the unimaginable hardships some of us have had to endure, to the newfound outlook of being hunkered away at home for [...]
The Best Films of 2020 – Robert Butler
As regularly, the best surprises came in smaller packages: One year after the foreign-language film "Parasite" wowed audiences, critics, and Oscar voters, foreign language films continued to reign supreme with such elegant titles like "To [...]
Pieces of a Woman
Life partners and creative duo Kornel Mundruczo and Kata Weber, known for idiosyncratic work such as White God and Jupiter's Moon, have tapped into a highly personal story with their latest effort, Pieces of a Woman. [...]
One Night in Miami
Empowering in ideas and full of compelling moments, "One Night in Miami" isn't your comprehensive biopic or period piece of the celebrated historical icons on display in Regina King's directorial debut. Instead, screenwriter Kemp Powers [...]
Ghost Tropic
Bas Devos's hypnotic and woozy Belgium film centers on a middle-aged Muslim woman, a widow, who gets lost during the late hours in Brussels. The film becomes very dreamlike and humanistic as it observes in [...]
