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
Gasoline Rainbow
Gasoline Rainbowsis a confused film. As with so many recent indy films, the movie believes it is more important than it is, and deeper, more profound. Concerning five kids from a small town in Oregon, [...]
Force of Nature: The Dry 2
The 2021 drama The Dry, adapted from the Jane Harper novel was an enormous hit for its home land of Australia and found a sizable audience here in the states. Featuring a career-best turn from [...]
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
“Apes together strong” At the end of 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, Caesar (Andy Serkis) had successfully gotten most of the apes under his care to a safe place. As he is [...]
The Idea of You
What a time to be in a resurgence for genuinely sexy romance films. No, not deliberately edgy fair such as the Fifty Shades films or even worse, the Netflix 365 Days trilogy, but films like [...]
The Fall Guy
Advocates of the studio's long-standing appetite for films based on beloved television shows will have a strong case for The Fall Guy. An action-packed comedy that also holds romance is a genuinely amusing and satisfying [...]
Jeanne du Barry
Jeanne du Barry, the new film from Maiwenn, who both directed and stars in the title role, is a bit of a stunner, just in terms of the visuals. It is not a perfect film, [...]
Evil Does Not Exist
Renowned Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi delivers his most enigmatic film yet with Evil Does Not Exist, a masterful study of corporate greed presented in a rural Japanese village. Immaculately shot and directed as always, and [...]
We Grown Now
We Grown Now is the latest independent feature by Minhai Baig, whose previous film Hala was also about youths sorting out their uncertain lives in Chicago. I enjoyed that film, and I was moved by [...]
Boy Kills World
Boy Kills World is a pastiche of homages and genres, even forms. The film is packed with some stunning imagery, yet none of it is especially novel or clever. This is not a problem, except [...]
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino pivots away from horror films back to romantic dramas that brought him such great notoriety in his earlier work, depicting characters experiencing forbidden love and desire in isolated, summer settings. These themes carry [...]
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
After cashing in his chips as a journeyman studio filmmaker for the better part of the 2010's, director Guy Ritchie has been on a streak of his own modestly budgeted "Tuff Guy" genre flicks. Since [...]
Stress Positions
Imagine a 95-minute lecture, from someone who isn't quite as insightful as they believe themselves to be. A lecture which is a bit funny at times, occasionally gives you whiplash, sometimes makes you think and [...]
Sasquatch Sunset
Indie filmmaking, brothers. Nathan Zellner and David Zellner (Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, Damsel), rework their Sundance Award-winning short film Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, and could have easily just left this bonkers of a feature as [...]
Housekeeping for Beginners
The dysfunctional and sometimes unstable, more often affecting portrait of a makeshift Macedonian family is evoked in a very thoughtful matter in Housekeeping for Beginners. The absorbing third feature by Macedonian Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski [...]