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
Bones and All
An impulsive misfit finds true love with a mysterious drifter in the bizarrely romantic horror-road movie Bones and All. The film echoes Claire Denis' cannibal love story Trouble Every Day with many shades of Terrence [...]
The Fabelmans
An emotionally complex, sentimental journey through the joyful and equally tormented memories of iconic filmmaker Steven Spielberg's artistic origins and formative years, Spielberg's latest film, The Fabelmans, is his own Amarcord about a Jewish-American teenager [...]
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Walt Disney. A Burl Ives TV musical. Italian animator Giuliano Cenci. Steve Barron, with 90’s heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas. A Kevin S. Tenney slasher film. Steven Spielberg, somewhat. Roberto Benigni. Italian animator Enzo D’Alo. Roberto [...]
Is That Black Enough for You?!?
The history of Black Cinema and Black people in cinema in the United States has been the focus of articles, books, and has been touched on in other films (memorably in Spike Lee’s satirical masterpiece [...]
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
In an era where a majority of films attempt to play it safe in order to turn a profit, two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths holds all [...]
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
It’s hard to overstate just how much of a phenomenon Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther was. A sea-changing moment in Hollywood for representation in film and a billion-dollar grossing blockbuster that instantly became a cultural touchstone. At [...]
Descendant
As the winners write the history books, so much history is left whitewashed, and some communities and individuals only have stories left that are passed on from our descendants. Not all history is recorded in [...]
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
At first, this "biopic" on Weird Al Yankovic starts by hitting all the beats and formulas of the Hollywood biopic genre, before co-writer and director Eric Appel and co-writer/producer "Weird Al" Yankovic take on Weird [...]
The Wonder
Spirituality collides with science in Sebastian Lelio's latest period film, titled The Wonder. While suffocated with implausible detours and anchored by its elegant craftsmanship, The Wonder casts an irresistible spell while spinning an adaptation of [...]
On the Line
At first glance, radio doesn’t seem to be the most dynamic world to base a film in. It’s a world of stationary voices, with images filled in by the listener’s mind. But there have been [...]
Armageddon Time
Absorbing and poignant, casually didactic and deeply personal, James Gray's Armageddon Time ends up being as engaging as it is uneven and glum. A fictionalized look at the filmmaker's childhood and family during 1980 is [...]
The Banshees of Inisherin
In a return to his roots, renowned British-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh does wonders in The Banshees of Inisherin. Marking his first film in the U.K. with an original script conceived for Ireland, McDonagh [...]
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Edward Berger’s anti-war epic All Quiet on the Western Front is a realistically graphic and riveting film based on the 1929 book of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. Shockingly grisly and pulling no [...]
Holy Spider
Modern Iran's worst serial killer, Saeed Hanaei, and the 16 female victims he lured into his home are chronicled in Iranian-born filmmaker Ali Abbasi's third feature, titled Holy Spider. The film is gripping with its [...]
