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
The Wedding Banquet (2025)
Charming and witty, The Wedding Banquet (2025) is a romantic comedy about two couples and friends who are attempting to take their relationship to the next level, but they hit many roadblocks along the way. [...]
The Shrouds
Filmmaking veteran and icon David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises, Dead Ringers) has always been celebrated as a great visual director, he's also a great writer too who is celebrated for his cerebral themes that can often [...]
Grand Tour
The sixth feature film by Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, Grand Tour plays out like a companion piece to his 2012 masterpiece Tabu, with some striking similarities to his 2008 sophomore film Our Beloved Month of [...]
The Amateur
The Amateur is the newest film from director James Hawes, starring Rami Malek as Charlie Heller, a government analyst who loses his wife in a terrorist attack. Following this tragedy, he decides to blackmail his [...]
Bob Trevino Likes It
Bob Trevino Likes It is one of those films that sneaks up on you. Drawn from the real life experiences of its writer and director, Tracie Laymon, the film tells the story of Lily, played [...]
The Penguin Lessons
At a first glimpse, it seems practical to easily dismiss The Penguin Lessons. For all its faults and obvious cliches, the film is actually very sincere in approach and execution, and Steven Coogan really turns [...]
A Minecraft Movie
The best-selling video game of all time, Minecraft was released in full to the world in late 2011 and has since sold over 300 million copies. While video game adaptations are as popular and successful [...]
Death of a Unicorn
As the studio continues to build its resumé with broader audiences, A24's latest cheeky genre flick aims to add a twist to the creature feature formula. Satirically tackling the pharmaceutical industry, this “killer unicorn” horror [...]
The Friend
The Friend is the newest film from Scott McGehee and David Siegel, based on an experimental, semi-autobiographical novel by Sigrid Nunez. Nunez had written the work in order to reach friends that she felt were in danger of [...]
Snow White
Continuing the seemingly never-ending strategy of remaking every classic animated film in their arsenal, Disney's latest update of a classic story goes all the way back to the beginning. Not only Disney's first fully animated [...]
Magazine Dreams
Magazine Dreams is the newest film from writer/director Elijah Bynum, last seen as the co-writer of the Lee Daniels dud, The Deliverance. Here, opting for a cast of much lesser-known actors, and headlined by a [...]
The Alto Knights
One of the most disappointing experiences one can have is to see a mob thriller starring not one, but two Robert De Niros (in dual roles) that's not particularly engaging or engrossing. Even worse is [...]
