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
Dumb Money
We have had many films be released about the current century's most trying historical events ranging from 9/11, to the IRAQ War, and the 2008 Financial crises to name just a few. The questions always [...]
A Haunting in Venice
In 2017, Kenneth Branagh, often an adaptor of classic literature in his work as an actor/director, set his sights on a new author and character: Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. While David Suchet had masterfully played [...]
The Equalizer 3
Oscar-winner Denzel Washington had never starred in a sequel throughout his eclectic career until The Equalizer 2, the follow-up to his popular reteaming with his Training Day director Antoine Fuqua. Based on the popular CBS [...]
2008 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2008
It was an election year with a terrible recession. After eight years of the Bush Administration, the public grew very tired of cronyism, corruption, and war. Reflecting back, we had so many thoughtful films to [...]
Fall Movie Preview 2023
by Robert Joseph Butler and Bart Woinski Summer 2023 was quite an unusual summer movie season. As SAG joined the WGA for the strike, we saw so many films underperform at the box office, which [...]
Gran Turismo
Video game adaptations are having one hell of a year. From the billion dollar juggernaut The Super Mario Bros Movie and the highly-acclaimed tour de force that is The Last of Us HBO series, we're finally [...]
Birth/Rebirth
The latest entry in the budding maternal/pregnancy horror subgenre, Birth/Rebirth, proves what fresh talents can create with a unique vision, despite using familiar building blocks. In this case, director and co-writer Laura Moss, making her [...]
Blue Beetle
The current state of DC films is as troubled as it has ever been. Following a series of commercial flops in Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and The Flash, the brand is on [...]
The Last Voyage of the Demeter
Among the many adaptations of Bram Stoker's classic novel, none have ever focused on just a mere chapter. Adapting the chapter consisting of the captain's log of the doomed ship, the Demeter, unknowingly carrying a [...]
Shortcomings
First and foremost, Shortcomings is a tour de force of one man's hypocrisy and dramatic irony. Asian-American filmmaker Randall Park makes his feature directorial debut chronicling the frustrating life of Ben (Justin H. Min), a [...]
Til Death Do Us Part
Recently, Netflix's latest action hit, Extraction 2, achieved streaming success and critical acclaim, but not every John Wick-esque beat-em-up hits the proverbial mark. See director Timothy Woodward Jr.'s ironically formless amalgamation of several popular films, [...]
Dreamin’ Wild
Hollywood loves a biopic. And within that greater subgenre, an area of deep focus is the music biopic. From 1909’s Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to last year’s Elvis, filmmakers have long been fascinated with [...]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
There's a simple hard truth out there that is difficult for many to swallow. There hasn't been an actual good film adaptation of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". The classic 1987 animated series is likely the [...]
Earth Mama
Another immersion in the exploration of systematic oppression for Black cinema, Earth Mama is a deeply artful portrait of a young pregnant woman's resilience against the foster care system. Through pristine use of super 16mm [...]
Theater Camp
We have experienced theatrics being mocked in mockumentary fashion before with Christopher Guests Waiting for Guffman, among many other subcultures. Molly Gordon and co-writer and co-director Nick Lieberman show signs of holding Guest's humor and [...]
Talk to Me
Believing that a pair of YouTubers would have one of 2023's most-anticipated horror films might seem like a tall order to most, but that is precisely the case for brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, AKA [...]