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
It’s a Wonderful Knife
The emerging trend of "classic family movie gets a campy slasher adaptation" continues with its first blatantly Christmas-themed entry, It's a Wonderful Knife, a spin on Frank Capra's 1946 holiday staple, It's a Wonderful Life. [...]
The Holdovers
A deeply humane and fully sustained absorption in loneliness, grief, world history, and philosophy, along with frequent quarrels between a history instructor and a small group of New England boarding school students The Holdovers marks [...]
The Burial
The courtroom drama film has been around nearly as long as the medium of film itself. Following what felt like an oversaturation in the Grisham-influenced 1990s, the genre seemed to fall somewhat out of favor [...]
When Evil Lurks
Following the success of his paranormal thriller Terrified, Argentinian director Demián Rugna returns with the highly-anticipated demon possession film When Evil Lurks. Rugna shocked audiences in 2017 with a horror film that focused heavily on [...]
Five Nights at Freddy’s
In 2014, a little indie video game created by Scott Cawthorn called Five Nights at Freddy's took online culture by storm. With playthroughs of the game racking up hundreds of millions of views, a unique [...]
The Killer (2023)
Carrying on the tradition of glossy hitman thrillers like La Samourai, Leon: The Professional, Kill Bill, and, of course, John Woo's own The Killer, David Fincher's 12th feature, The Killer, is just as engrossing and [...]
2013 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2013
At the end of 2013, an old friend said 2013 was a year that reflected our cultural crossroads. It was exactly a year after President Obama won re-election that the country appeared to be more [...]
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
Despite dominating pop culture and music charts for over 15 years, we seem to be in the height of Taylor Swift's popularity. From reclaiming the ownership of her master tapes and re-recording her old albums, [...]
Dark Harvest
Arguably a decade too late, Norman Partridge's acclaimed 2006 novel Dark Harvest has finally become realized as a feature film. The movie of the same name, picked up by MGM from New Regency earlier this [...]
Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese's contemplative and high-minded American epic Western crime drama is based on the 2017 non-fiction novel of the same title by David Grann. Killers of the Flower Moon arrives as Scorsese's 26th narrative feature [...]
Anatomy of a Fall
To say that Juliet Triet's courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall is riveting and worthy of all its praise on the festival circuit would be something of an understatement. This is one of those gripping [...]
She Came to Me
The ending is quite charming—and so is the beginning—in She Came to Me, Rebecca Miller's (Personal Velocity, Maggies Plan) offbeat romance about an aging opera composer attempting to make a comeback from a years-long writer's [...]
The Royal Hotel
While the suffocating and lurking elements of The Assistant (2020) may have been the most impressive factor, the emotional depth of courage and endurance invested by Kitty Green in the bonds between her characters make [...]
Totally Killer
At this point in cinematic history, it is baffling that a horror movie has failed to properly take advantage of the Back to the Future formula, sending its protagonist(s) back in time to stop some [...]
The Creator
In contemporary Hollywood, with the propensity for inflated budgets leading to entire sets made of green or blue screen and an over-reliance on digital effects, it is difficult to come away from a movie asking, [...]