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 Beekeeper
Jason Statham, one of cinema's most consistent modern action stars, is coming off a rough year. While his Meg 2: The Trench earned over $400 million, it was a waste of his talents. Same goes [...]
Mean Girls (2024)
Mean Girls has been a pinnacle of pop culture in the two decades since its release. The 2004 Tina Fey-scripted comedy starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams was an immediate success upon release, but became [...]
Destroy All Neighbors
The first significant Shudder original release of 2024 could be the year's most off-the-wall horror movie. Destroy All Neighbors hits the streamer today from director Josh Forbes, an experienced music video director bringing his knowledge [...]
Four Daughters
Four Daughters is promptly proving how layered and experimental documentaries can be. Documentarian Kouther Ben Hania's latest docu-fiction merges documentary with reenactments in this engrossing story about femininity and family in crisis in Tunisia. It's [...]
A Holiday I Do
Christmas may be over, but the holiday season is still in full effect, and its undeniable magic lingers in the form of the Michigan-made LGBTQ+ rom-com A Holiday I Do. Directors Paul and Alicia Schnieder [...]
Society of the Snow
The true story of the survivors of the 1972 Uruguayan plane crash over the Andes mountains has been translated into film before, most notably in the 1993 Ethan Hawke starring film Alive. While the remarkable [...]
Night Swim
Expectations for the first release under any big media merger are always high, and all eyes are currently on Bryce McGuire's theatrical feature debut, Night Swim. The high-concept suburban chiller falls under the newly completed [...]
The Boys in the Boat
With handsome production values and good intentions, The Boys in the Boat is George Clooney's earnest but bland historical sports drama about the University of Washington rolling team that competed for gold in the 1936 [...]
The Teachers’ Lounge
With some sharp writing, timely social commentary, and a wrenching performance by German actress Leonie Benesch, there are many reasons to embrace The Teachers' Lounge, a debut feature by İlker Çatak, who wrote it with [...]
The Color Purple (2023)
It was only a matter of time before the Broadway musical that is a dual adaptation of Alice Walker's novel and Steven Spielberg's 1985 American epic of the same title, The Color Purple (2023), would [...]
The Best Films of 2023-Robert Butler
Just as the movie theater experience started to look gloom again, 2023 was a year where was once again rescued and the moviegoing experience ended up feeling like parties and events. The release of Barbenheimer [...]
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
No one would ever want to be in the position that director James Wan has been put in with the sequel to his billion-dollar grossing superhero epic Aquaman. Coming off the heels of [...]
The Best Horror Films of 2023
The horror genre continues to impress in terms of quality and financial performance at the box office. In 2023, fans of the dark and twisted savored many high-concept original pictures, great franchise continuations, and plenty [...]
The Iron Claw
It would be a cliche to point out that the best films about wrestling use the sport as a metaphor for the internal struggles going on outside the ring. In other words, the emotional gravity [...]
All of Us Strangers
There is often a certain melancholy to ghost movies—even when they are at their most terrifying, they often rely on themes of past trauma, grief, and other forms of reconciliation. Those themes cross over again [...]
American Fiction
The tastes of the public at large when it comes to art are a constant enigma. Often works of great depth and intelligence are passed over while something perceived as lower quality catches hold in [...]
Leave the World Behind
Director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) has shuffled back to feature filmmaking with the begrudgingly-paced but captivating apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, based on Rumaan Alam's 2020 novel. The Netflix film flew under the radar [...]