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
Shortcomings
First and foremost, Shortcomings is a tour de force of one man's hypocrisy and dramatic irony. Asian-American filmmaker Randall Park makes his feature directorial debut chronicling the frustrating life of Ben (Justin H. Min), a [...]
Til Death Do Us Part
Recently, Netflix's latest action hit, Extraction 2, achieved streaming success and critical acclaim, but not every John Wick-esque beat-em-up hits the proverbial mark. See director Timothy Woodward Jr.'s ironically formless amalgamation of several popular films, [...]
Dreamin’ Wild
Hollywood loves a biopic. And within that greater subgenre, an area of deep focus is the music biopic. From 1909’s Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to last year’s Elvis, filmmakers have long been fascinated with [...]
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
There's a simple hard truth out there that is difficult for many to swallow. There hasn't been an actual good film adaptation of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles". The classic 1987 animated series is likely the [...]
Earth Mama
Another immersion in the exploration of systematic oppression for Black cinema, Earth Mama is a deeply artful portrait of a young pregnant woman's resilience against the foster care system. Through pristine use of super 16mm [...]
Theater Camp
We have experienced theatrics being mocked in mockumentary fashion before with Christopher Guests Waiting for Guffman, among many other subcultures. Molly Gordon and co-writer and co-director Nick Lieberman show signs of holding Guest's humor and [...]
Talk to Me
Believing that a pair of YouTubers would have one of 2023's most-anticipated horror films might seem like a tall order to most, but that is precisely the case for brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, AKA [...]
Haunted Mansion
Debuting in 1969, The Haunted Mansion has hosted countless foolish mortals for decades, firmly cementing itself into pop culture history. The attraction has been seen as a gateway into the realm of horror for many, myself [...]
Oppenheimer
The previous film from master of cinema Christopher Nolan, Tenet, his chopped-and-screwed take on the Bond thriller, was released amidst the height of the Pandemic, attempting to be the first film to usher audiences back [...]
They Cloned Tyrone
Cloning is a topic that filmmakers have been fascinated with for years. While the roots of the topic are in science-fiction such as Moon or Swan Song, it has found a place in action (The Sixth Day, Gemini Man), [...]
Sound of Freedom
The emerging sleeper hit of the summer, Sound of Freedom has seemingly come out of nowhere and upended all expectations, collecting close to $100 million at the box office, as of this writing. The supposed [...]
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
With now seven films in the franchise under his belt and reaching 61 years of age, cinema's maverick, Tom Cruise, has continued to push the envelope in large-scale filmmaking at a time when very few [...]
Lakota Nation vs. United States
Rarely do documentaries make one feel like their grade school education left out a lot of crucial details about their country's history; Lakota Nation vs. United States does just that. It also highlights the perverse [...]
