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
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
The main characters from the old and the new Ghostbusters films find themselves once again squaring off against ghosts, ghouls, and red-tape bureaucracy in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. After Ghostbusters: Afterlife improved upon Paul Feig’s passable [...]
Late Night with the Devil
A descendant of the Found Footage sub genre, the latest film from Australian filmmaking duo Cameron & Colin Cairnes is the kind of indie gem that makes horror such an exciting genre. A cheeky throwback [...]
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Nearly 20 years after the Romania New Wave took international cinema by storm with such titles as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, and 12:08 East of Bucharest, Romanian [...]
Hundreds of Beavers
Hundreds of Beavers is certainly a film. Is it a good film, or an enjoyable one? That may depend on many factors, including your tolerance for the bizarre, zany, and downright, at times, hallucinogenic work on [...]
Love Lies Bleeding
Director Rose Glass’ feature directorial debut Saint Maud became a casualty of the pandemic, seeing its release delayed and delayed, ultimately dumped in early 2021 with little fanfare. The religious horror thriller showed great potential [...]
6th Annual Defacto Film Awards
As we always do in honor of the Oscars, we are pleased to announce the 6th Annual Defacto Film Awards. This year, we did things even more democratically as opposed to doing separate ballots in [...]
Oscar Predictions 2024
After months of precursor award shows, the Oscars are finally going to be awarded this coming Sunday, March 10. Jimmy Kimmel has the hosting duties for a second year in a row, with the Academy [...]
Amelia’s Children
If you are a horror fan, you are probably conscious of the contrasts between American and foreign genre films. Mainstream Hollywood productions frequently offer a commercial look and feel, while independent projects straddle the line [...]
Dune: Part Two
After impressing audiences and critics with the deserts of Arrakis in 2021 with Dune: Part One, the grandiose space opera continues on in Dune: Part Two. The middle section of filmmaker Dennis Villeneuve's visionary adaptation [...]
Drive-Away Dolls
With Drive-Away Dolls, his second solo feature without brother Joel, iconic filmmaker Ethan Coen proves that, along with his lifetime editor and wife Tricia Cooke, they too can produce a whacky comedy that offers a [...]
Michigan Showcase: Thorns
Thorns, the latest prominent independent horror production from Michigan, features horror icon Doug Bradley (Hellraiser) amidst a classic clash of religion versus science—or, in this case, religion through science. Michigan native Douglas Schulze (Hellmaster, Dark [...]
Driving Madeleine
With Driving Madeleine, director and co-writer Christian Caron, has wrought a minor miracle, in terms of striking a balance between comedy and drama, and between philosophy and action, all of which propel this film as [...]
Stopmotion
Horror films focused on artists dealing with madness are certainly nothing new. From the great Vincent Price in House of Wax, to Jack Nicholson in The Shining, to Yahya Abdul-Mateen in the recent Candyman legacy [...]
About Dry Grasses
Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan continues his grandiose creative momentum with his latest art-house dramatic epic, About Dry Grasses. With his 2014 Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep (which made my top ten list in 2014) [...]
Io Capitano
Io Capitano marks a significant comeback for a well-known Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Tale of Tales, Dogman). The harrowing feature takes viewers into a visceral world of migrant struggles that many privileged people simplistically [...]
They Shot the Piano Player
Audiences looking for historical perspective and something unique, not to mention a tribute to music, will find it in They Shot the Piano Player, a refreshing new animated film by the filmmaking duo of Fernando [...]