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 Pale Blue Eye
While their era of handing out massive blank checks may be coming to a close, Netflix is still dolling out hefty sums of cash for creatives when they're not cancelling dozens of beloved shows. Writer/director [...]
Saint Omer
While the film holds all the striking realism of a documentary, the emotional depth displayed by French filmmaker Alice Diop bounces between a courtroom drama and a cinema verité chamber piece with emotionally charged results. [...]
A Man Called Otto
It's now been seven years since the Swedish comedy-drama A Man Called Ove (2015) became an Oscar nominee for Best International Film and Best Makeup, and it was a critical and commercial success as it generated [...]
This Place Rules
Largely constructed in the form of his Channel 5 (formerly All Gas No Brakes) content, journalist turned documentary filmmaker Andrew Callaghan gives us his directorial debut with This Place Rules; a collection of footage and interviews that Andrew and [...]
The Best Films of 2022-Robert Butler
What will be said about 2022 in cinema? Week after week, we continue to hear about dour box office numbers and that theaters are in crisis. Certain columns claim the state of cinema is dying. [...]
Babylon
A first-rate cast, high ambitions, and grandiose spectacle certainly prevent Babylon from being a complete trainwreck in Oscar-winning filmmaker Damien Chazelle's latest feature. With extraordinary set-pieces and spectacular craftsmanship, plus superlative performances by Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, [...]
Avatar: The Way of Water
It’s been exhaustively questioned as to whether James Cameron’s Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time, originally unseating Cameron’s own Titanic, has sustained its influence on pop culture as it did on filmmaking technology, [...]
Christmas Bloody Christmas
2022 has not only been a standout year for horror with both critical and commercial hits such as Smile, Barbarian, X, Terrifier 2, Pearl and more. The year is also notable for its Christmas-themed genre [...]
Emancipation
The deplorable history of slavery in the United States has been the focus of many films over the years. The films have been of varying quality, and there have also been various tones and angles [...]
White Noise
White Noise is another disappointing Don DeLillo adaptation. One of the most difficult tasks of any screenwriter or director would have to be fulfilling the duty of adapting one of DeLillo's works. If done at [...]
Empire of Light
Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes pays tribute to the cinema in Empire of Light, a film of lofty themes that doesn't necessarily ring true or capture the depth that it's aiming for. Mendes certainly is attempting [...]
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, seasoned documentary filmmaker and Academy Award winner Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) delivers her most wrenching film yet, a galvanizing, deeply powerful documentary about photographer Nan Goldin, who shares her [...]
Good Night Oppy
From the earliest days, Man has looked to the skies and wondered what is out there. As technology advanced, humans have been able to travel first to orbit around the Earth, and then to the [...]
Violent Night
Filmmaker Tommy Wirkola is best known for making high concept genre films that often dabble in the ridiculous. This is the director who has given us two Nazi zombie movies, a film about a witch-hunting [...]