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. His reviews have also been featured and published in The Oakland Press as well, which is one of Michigan’s largest newspaper publications.
He later went on 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. His short film “The Girl on the Mat” won Best Screenplay at the 2017 Queens World Film Festival. His most recent feature length movie, “Blood Immortal,” won Best Horror Feature Film at the 24th annual Indie Gathering International Film Festival and is now available to own on DVD and is available on Digital streaming platforms.
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.
Rating System–4 Stars
Masterpiece/Top 10 Worthy
Exceptional
Quality
Mediocre
Poor
Reviews published in
Calle Malaga
Some films can get by on visual splendor, and others on character. Some, of course, manage through plot or pure nerve. Calle Malaga is none of these. It is a lovely looking film but never takes [...]
A Private Life
Co-writer and director Rebecca Zlotowski revisits the whole American in Paris trope in her recent black comedy mystery thriller A Private Life, about a highly regarded psychiatrist, Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster), who fosters her own [...]
The Best Films of 2025 – Editors’ Choice
Do not believe anyone that tells you 2025 was a weak year for cinema. In many respects, 2025 was an embarrassment of riches for many different genres and styles of storytelling. We've been treated to [...]
The Testament of Ann Lee
A passionate, stylistic, opera-like musical of deep vision and scope, this engaging movie is one of the most idiosyncratic films of the year from the acclaimed duo of co-writer Brady Corbet and his partner, co-writer [...]
H is for Hawk
H is for Hawk is based on the 2014 memoir of the same name. Claire Foy plays Helen MacDonald, an academic in England who is about to lose her residency and so must give thought [...]
Return to Silent Hill
In 2006, filmmaker Christophe Gans made the film adaptation of the popular Konami survival horror game franchise Silent Hill. The film was a decent hit, raking in over $100 million at the box office, but [...]
KPop Demon Hunters
Korean Pop is not something this reviewer is overly familiar with. Going in to a film like K-Pop Demon Hunters, one might think that at least a surface familiarity would be needed to catch certain things [...]
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
The fourth installment in the 28 Days Later film series and part of the double bill that is a direct continuation of 2025's 28 Years Later, the post-apocalyptic horror film based on Alex Garland's screenplay [...]
Sound of Falling
Plot and story are intimately connected yet not always the same thing. A film can have a great story but a weak plot, or a great plot and weak story. Some films are not concerned [...]
Dead Man’s Wire
Dead Man's Wire is a type of film that any director-for-hire could have easily gotten the job done for this crime thriller. However, household legend Gus Van Sant has turned this into something engrossing and [...]
Is This Thing On?
Is This Thing On? Is the best film Bradley Cooper has made as a director, and it is not even close. This is because the film is the first time he has gotten out of his [...]
A Little Prayer
A Little Prayer is one of those films that comes along all too rarely. Writer and director Angus MacLachlan, who wrote the screenplay for Junebug, has fashioned a simple yet powerful story about a family [...]
The Plague
Very much in the vein of William Golding's Lord of the Flies novel, Charlie Polinger's debut feature that premiered at the Un Certain Regard at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival is a stylish, spellbinding, and [...]
Year in Review: The Best Films of 2025
As I walked out of the New York Film Festival back in the fall, I knew I could easily develop a top ten list upon the festival because I knew just about everything notable was [...]
Splitsville
Splitsville is a film about two couples in comedic, dramatic and all too real emotional peril, with performances and situations that will feel both fresh and familiar. It is, at times, a little raunchy, and yet [...]