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
We Live in Time
What probably read out like a Lifetime or Hallmark movie during a table read, and what probably would still be one if in lesser hands, Joe Crowley's We Live in Time is a weepy love [...]
The Apprentice
Just as with Oliver Stone's political films, Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi has delivered an undeniably engaging and deeply disturbing biopic on Donald Trump's rise to corporate power in the late 1970s and into the 1980s [...]
Terrifier 3
Modern horror icon Art the Clown returns to the big screen in Terrifier 3, the latest in Damien Leone's extreme slasher franchise.
Saturday Night
Jason Reitman is a skilled director, and he may have finally found his flair in Saturday Night. That might seem like a surprising statement about the director who has made such highly acclaim films as [...]
Rebel Ridge
Police corruption, civil liberties, and martial arts collide in Jeremy Saulnier's newest effort for Netflix, Rebel Ridge.
The Outrun
The Outrun is a new drama based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot. Here, director Nora Fingscheidt, who co-wrote the screenplay with Liptrot, casts Saoirse Ronan as Rona, in a fine turn as an alcoholic [...]
Joker: Folie à Deux
2019's Joker was a lighting-in-a-bottle film that came with much buzz and discourse, with overwhelming box office returns to boot. Todd Phillips' distinct vision of the classic DC villain was met with equal amounts of [...]
The WIld Robot
DreamWorks Animation has typically been seen as the B-side to the greater works of Pixar. When there was Toy Story 1 & 2, there was DreamWorks’ Shrek, which was less emotionally demanding, but still proved [...]
Will & Harper
Will & Harper is a documentary about friendship. It is also about belonging, identity, understanding and acceptance. Often, this is as much about the person one might think least needs to consider these themes. But that [...]
Megalopolis
It was inevitable that both film critics and modern film buffs wouldn't be fully united on Francis Ford Coppola's latest magnum opus, Megalopolis, a highly sophisticated, dense, and visionary film that surely holds many shortcomings [...]
Strange Darling
After a large array of horror and serial killer thrillers full of style and atmosphere, 2024 continues its horror streak with JT Mollner's gripping, brutally intense, and wildly unpredictable Strange Darling. It is one of [...]
Speak No Evil (2024)
The 2022 Danish film Speak No Evil left a toll on any audience member willing to sit through its punishing display of brutality. Directed and co-written by Christian Tafdrup, the original film was an oppressively [...]
The Substance
The Substance is a riptide of desire, chaos, the vain reality of Hollywood, and outwardly grotesque body horror. It's also one of the most shocking and impactful genre films of 2024.
The 4:30 Movie
In the wake of films such as Roma, The Fabelmans and Belfast, films that saw major filmmakers looking past nostalgia to their respective upbringings, writer/director/editor Kevin Smith has now made his own coming-of-age film largely [...]
Close Your Eyes
If there is one filmmaker that works at an even slower pace than Jonathan Glazer and Terrence Malick did, it's Spanish auteur Victor Erice. He has only released four features now in the last 50 [...]
The Critic
The Critic, based on the novel Curtain Call is set in the world of 1930s London. Here, we meet Jimmy Erskine who has been the drama critic for The Chronicle, for decades. He wields his pen and opinions [...]