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
1993 Retrospective: The Best Films of 1993
1993 was a remarkable year, a year where Schindler's List dominated the conversation and held a critical consensus of being the film of the year that went on to win 7 Academy Awards, including Best [...]
The Pope’s Exorcist
For modern moviegoers, most blockbuster supernatural horror feels familiar; a family arrives at a house, wherein spooky things suddenly go bump in the night, and one or more of them inadvertently falls prey to the [...]
Rare Objects
Over the course of the past five years or so, it has become more common to see compassionate films come out that boldly explore the traumas of sexual assault and harassment to help build awareness [...]
Mafia Mamma
While the mafia comedy has certainly run its course in cinema, it hardly needs another addition: we have had some sharply funny ones previously with such titles like My Cousin Vinny and Get [...]
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
In How to Blow Up a Pipeline, one of the most suspenseful and taut political thrillers released recently, filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber delivers a satisfying blend of suspense and social commentary. An engrossing eco-thriller that is [...]
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
As a child of the 90's, Nintendo, and the characters of the Mushroom Kingdom have been a critical asset of my upbringing. Whether it was staying up late at a friends house trying to destroy [...]
Showing Up
After debuting a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, Kelly Reichardt's eighth feature titled Showing Up finally gets its North American release. It stars frequent collaborator Michelle Williams, fresh off her Oscar [...]
A Thousand and One
In her remarkable feature directorial debut, A.V. Rockwell's poignantly rendered A Thousand and One goes head-on with some very potent issues such as race in America, our flawed institutions, the duplicity of gentrification, and just [...]
Smoking Causes Coughing
Get ready to board Quentin Dupieux's crazy train again with his latest endeavor, Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer Fait Tousser), a sardonic pastiche of retro superhero shows like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja [...]
The Worst Ones
The Worst Ones, a French drama film directed by Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret, and a coming-of-age mockumentary which snagged itself the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2022, is a nuanced critique of [...]
The Novelist’s Film
Hong Sang-soo's latest small-scale and intimate art-house truffle feels like a continuation from his previous film, In Your Face, in which an aging artist takes a casual visit to Seoul and gets whisked away by [...]
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
The tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has been around since the mid-1970s. It was initially a sensation, though the fortunes of the game and the various companies that have owned it have waxed and [...]
A Good Person
Two deeply compelling characters desperately needing to find atonement after a devastating tragedy ruinously reconnect in Zach Braff's four-director feature A Good Person. Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman headline a strong cast in this deeply [...]
John Wick: Chapter 4
It's hard to imagine a franchise that finds new and inventive ways to consistently deliver like the John Wick franchise. What began as a quest for revenge over a puppy has spiralled into a franchise [...]
Tori and Lokita
It is remarkable just how the Dardenne Brothers are still turning out emotionally charged and emotionally bleak films that hold deeply felt compassion nearly 30 years after making a splash with their 1996 feature film [...]