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 Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
From the first minute, the most noticeable aspect of The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster is the freshness it brings to an overdone premise. Mary Shelley's groundbreaking novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and [...]
No Hard Feelings
The R-rated studio comedy has become one of the larger victims to the streaming era. The days of big, successful studio comedies like Bridesmaids, Girls Trip and The Hangover have severely diminished when streaming services [...]
Asteroid City
Sophisticated, meta, and deadpan, Asteroid City finds world-renowned auteur Wes Anderson recapturing a similar story as he has in the past but working on a much larger canvas where he gets to experiment more with [...]
Past Lives
From David Lean's Brief Encounter to Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, and Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy, there have been a substantial number of films released in the [...]
Extraction 2
In the current cinematic climate, packed to the gills with overblown action movies, one rarely stands out, and 2020's Extraction is hardly the exception. However, its impressive one-take scene, consistently explosive action sequences, and Chris [...]
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Michael Bay's Transformers franchise was once, for better or for worse, a franchise that largely marched to the beat of its own drum. Guided by Bay's distinct filmmaking approach, the franchise was an undeniable trendsetter for [...]
Brooklyn 45
The World War II era has been fertile ground for filmmakers for decades. It lends itself to a very wide spectrum of genre and tone, which is likely why it has remained so used for [...]
The Boogeyman
Rob Savage's breakthrough debut film Host was one of the few projects to emerge early on in the Pandemic that utilized the made the most of its resources, delivering a terrifying film set entirely over [...]
1998 Retrospective: The Best Films of 1998
Even in 1998, people were claiming cinema was dying. As I recall, I was told this as I had a VHS copy of The Big Lebowski in my hand, and a local film buff neighbor [...]
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Just shy of five years ago, the unexpected Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a shot in the arm to the comic book genre. With its distinct approach to animation, capturing the immersive feeling [...]
The Machine
Anyone familiar with Youtube around 2016 will be remember a stand-up comedy bit that was shared everywhere. The bit, coming from comedian Bert Kreischer in his special The Machine, was Kreischer's true story of how [...]
Sancturary
A thorny and unconventional love story, Zachary Wigon's sophomore feature Sancturary plays out more like a modern expansion of Steven Shanberg's 2002 indie classic Secretary, about two people bouncing in and out of potential love [...]
The Little Mermaid
Continuing the spotty track record of Disney live-action remakes, Rob Marshall's adaptation of the animated classic, largely responsible for ushering in the Disney Renaissance, continuing with the likes of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and [...]
You Hurt My Feelings
New York City is proving to be a comfortable setting for the greatly skilled Nicole Holofcener. From her breakthrough indie debut Walking and Talking to Enough Said and co-writing Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Holofcener [...]