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 Machine
Anyone familiar with Youtube around 2016 will be remember a stand-up comedy bit that was shared everywhere. The bit, coming from comedian Bert Kreischer in his special The Machine, was Kreischer's true story of how [...]
Sancturary
A thorny and unconventional love story, Zachary Wigon's sophomore feature Sancturary plays out more like a modern expansion of Steven Shanberg's 2002 indie classic Secretary, about two people bouncing in and out of potential love [...]
The Little Mermaid
Continuing the spotty track record of Disney live-action remakes, Rob Marshall's adaptation of the animated classic, largely responsible for ushering in the Disney Renaissance, continuing with the likes of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and [...]
You Hurt My Feelings
New York City is proving to be a comfortable setting for the greatly skilled Nicole Holofcener. From her breakthrough indie debut Walking and Talking to Enough Said and co-writing Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Holofcener [...]
White Men Can’t Jump (2023)
The new White Men Can’t Jump remake, helmed by director Calmatic, has a lot to like, although it still comes off a lot less satisfying than the 1992 original. The 1992 original, starring Wesley Snipes [...]
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
One of the most heart wrenching events in entertainment is the sudden cessation of a burgeoning career, particularly that of a universally well-liked, talented star. So when movie and TV darling Michael J. Fox, famed [...]
Moon Garden
Centering a film on a child’s performance can be a great risk for a filmmaker. On one hand, as all of us were once children, and many are parents, there is a commonality that can [...]
The Mother
JLO is a Mother. She's also now THE Mother. Yes, that is not only the given name for her character, but the title of the film, in which Lopez states, "I'm a mother", at least [...]
Master Gardener
A relatively clunky and implausible character study about a troubled man attempting to atone for his past deeds is served up with mixed results in Paul Schrader's Master Gardner. Channeling his own work, in which [...]
Fool’s Paradise
Hollywood is certainly a hollow place, an industry that chews actors and celebrities right up only to spit them right out, as the old cliche goes. By holding the industry up to scrutiny, this satirical [...]
The Starling Girl
The Starling Girl, the debut film by Laurel Palmet, could more aptly be titled: “that Starling girl,” just by the way it victimizes its main character alone. It’s a story about a young Christian fundamentalist girl, [...]
BlackBerry
In the ever-present biopic genre, the rise of technology companies has meant the rise of film and television stories about the people behind these companies. Pirates of Silicon Valley, Jobs, Steve Jobs, The Dropout, WeCrashed, [...]
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Less than ten years ago, Marvel studios took what was deemed their first real risk, making a film featuring a d-list roster of Marvel heroes, alongside their most popular heroes, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, [...]
The Eight Mountains
Belgian filmmaker Felix van Groeningen makes another film outside of his homeland but returns to his smaller-scale emotional dramas like The Broken Circle Breakdown with The Eight Mountains, a long way home from his Hollywood [...]