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
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 [...]
The Old Oak
The Old Oak, the latest, and possibly the final film, from legendary director Ken Loach, is as vital, stirring, somber, and clear eyed as the rest of his work. Concentrating on a nearly extinct northern [...]
La Chimera
Shades of Italian neo-realism, magical realism, and silent movies are on full display in La Chimera, a moving, observed comedic period drama centered on a Tuscany village that discovers Etruscan artifacts in the 1980s. Strong [...]
Wicked Little Letters
“We worship a messiah who suffered, so by suffering, don’t we move closer to Heaven?” “...No, I don’t think so.” This exchange, between the devout Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and her father Edward (Timothy Spall), [...]
Monkey Man
There is no doubt that John Wick's dynamic, revenge-fueled action odyssey alongside international martial arts spectacles, including The Raid and Ong Bak, have together metamorphized a once-stagnant genre into something that continues to shock, awe, [...]
The First Omen
Religious horror is going through a bit of a boom at the moment. From last month's sleeper success, the Sydney Sweeney-starring/produced Immaculate, and now this prequel to the 1976 classic The Omen, the genre has [...]
The Listener
The Listener, from director Steve Buscemi, is an unusual film in the sense that it has only one onscreen character, a woman calling herself “Beth” who works for an unnamed company, where various, and random, [...]
Coup de Chance
Familiar elements, themes, and plot mechanics go full circle in Woody Allen's Coup de Chance, a compelling study of a love affair in crises that expands on familiar Woody Allen themes dating back to his [...]
Problemista
The endlessly screwed-up immigration and economic exploitation that make the American immigration experience challenging are on full display in Problemista. Writer-director and co-star Julio Torres creates a messy, uneven piece of work, capturing the struggling [...]
The Truth vs. Alex Jones
The Truth vs. Alex Jones, an HBO release, which debuted at South by Southwest on March 11, 2024, is the latest in a long line of strong HBO documentaries, including the Spike Lee works, 4 [...]