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
Black Adam
While not as iconic as the upper echelon of DC characters, Black Adam as actually been around since the mid 1940’s. The character, initially introduced as a villain to Captain Marvel/Shazam has seen his legacy [...]
Ticket to Paradise
Ticket to Paradise is one of the broad romantic comedies we have all seen before. You know the kind like 50 First Dates, Couples Retreat, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the characters interact on a [...]
Halloween Ends
It’s hard to think of a franchise with more retcons, different timelines, and broken continuity than the Halloween franchise. How strange to think that a classic horror film from 1978 that excels in its own [...]
Decision to Leave
An engrossing, whodunit murder mystery about desire, murder, and forbidden love, Decision to Leave is a complicated and intricate mind-game of a movie. The film directed with such vigorous craftsmanship by Park Chanwook in his [...]
Stars at Noon
Claire Denis's sensual and tense adaptation of the late Denis Johnson 1986 novel, Stars at Noon, is a stylish, sophisticated, genre-bending reworking of the espionage geopolitical thriller. On the surface, it has all the espionage [...]
Hellraiser (2022)
The Hellraiser franchise has seen more than its fair share of ups and (mostly) downs. Created by horror maestro Clive Barker, adapting from his own novella, “The Hellbound Heart”, the original Hellraiser film introduced audiences to [...]
Catherine Called Birdy
With miscalculated dry humor and unfunny banter that delivers so much low energy, filmmaker Lena Dunham burns through her biggest budget to date on her well-intentioned medieval satire titled Catherine Called Bird, an adaptation of [...]
The Munsters
It wouldn’t take much thought to understand the appeal of a film adaptation of the classic 60’s sitcom, The Munsters, to filmmaker/hard rocker Rob Zombie. The multi-talent’s breakthrough hit solo single, Dragula, is taken directly [...]
Triangle of Sadness
Utilizing rich ideas on class warfare with razor-sharp satire, a brilliantly written script, and stellar visuals, Triangle of Sadness captures the absurdist spirit of Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise and even Pasolini's [...]
God’s Creatures
A superbly crafted work from the collaborating duo of Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, God's Creatures is a potent, somber examination of a mother struggling to come to terms with the fact that her [...]
Hocus Pocus 2
Most adults that grew up from the early 90’s to the early 2000’s likely had the 1993 film Hocus Pocus in their Halloweentime rotation. The film, which came from a marriage of the minds between [...]
My Best Friend’s Exorcism
Exorcism stories are nothing new in horror. Neither are 1980s period pieces. But sometimes even well-trod ground can be combined to create something special. Such was the case in 2016 when Grady Hendrix released his [...]
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Attempting back to his historical period-piece roots after his Best Picture win for Green Book, filmmaker Peter Farrelly attempts to throw a well-intentioned beer party with The Greatest Beer Run Ever, laying on historical perspective, [...]
The Good House
As a film that aims to make an essential and involving film about a woman's career and struggles with alcoholism, The Good House is dramatically inert and maudlin, a film that hits so many false [...]
