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
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 [...]
The Lost King
King Richard III has long been a figure of historical and literary fascination. While some contemporary accounts describe him as a good ruler, particularly to common folk, his legacy has largely been shaded by descriptions [...]
Boston Strangler
The latest in a long line of media adaptations about one of the darkest eras in Bostonian history, Matt Ruskin's Boston Strangler attempts to repurpose the prolific serial killer and shine a light [...]
Full River Red
Zhang Yimou, a filmmaker of China’s Fifth Generation, loomed large in American art house theaters in the early 1990s. This came following the nomination of his third film, Ju Dou, for a Best Foreign Language [...]
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
The 2019 Shazam! was seen as a breath of fresh air, not only for the DC universe which was licking their wounds after the disastrous results of the 2017 theatrically-released Justice League, but for the [...]
5th Annual Defacto Film Awards
To celebrate Oscar weekend, we are pleased to announce the 5thAnnual Defacto Film Awards. This year, we did things a lot more democratically as opposed to doing separate ballots in previous years. The voting was [...]