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
Sharp Stick
Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham's first feature since her 2010 breakthrough indie darling Tiny Furniture, is a fearless sex comedy that plays like an inferior episode of Girls, Diablo Cody wannabes, and other offbeat indies about [...]
Spin Me Round
While there are many laughs that last throughout the course of the running time in Spin Me Round, the fifth film from writer-director Jeff Baena (Horse Girl, The Little Hours, Life After Beth) that aims [...]
Rogue Agent
People, on the whole, can be gullible – they want to believe a good story. Particularly if there is something exciting in it which gives them a chance to transcend the mundanity of everyday life. [...]
Emily the Criminal
Emily the Criminal is a gripping neo-noir film that explores a human story of desperation beneath the surface, looking beyond the modern-day desperations of a debt nation and the horrors of income inequality. It focuses [...]
Bodies Bodies Bodies
Some dark comedy and modern satire on narcissistic millennials and Gen Z-ers can't quite disguise the Clue origins of Bodies Bodies Bodies. A highly enjoyable and thrilling whodunit set mostly in an upper-class mansion in [...]
Bullet Train
David Leitch has had one of the more notable career trajectories of the past decade. A former stuntman known for his work on everything from The Matrix films, to 300, The Bourne Ultimatum and later [...]
2007 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2007
2007 was the year that will always be remembered for the return of the western in all its forms, with traditional (3:10 to Yuma), neo-western (No Country for Old Men), and revisionism (The Assassination of [...]
DC League of Super-Pets
For every major hard-hitting animation studio that exists like Pixar or the critically beloved Studio Ghibli and Laika, there are other animation groups that don't get nearly the same recognition. Illumination is responsible for the [...]
Resurrection
In departing from short films and DIY-indie feature films, indie filmmaker Andrew Semans delivers shocks in the involving and bizarre Resurrection. The ever-riveting Rebecca Hall stars as a pharmaceutical company representative, and Tim Roth as [...]
A Love Song
The vast open spaces of the American West have been used to great effect throughout the history of cinema. Across decades and across genres, these landscapes have been used to symbolize freedom, rugged individualism, and [...]
My Old School
A stranger-than-fiction type of documentary that could easily be made into a narrative feature, My Old School is a bizarre documentary by Jono McLeod about Scotland's most notorious high school scandal, which was about a [...]
The Gray Man
Since their release of Marvel’s Captain America: Winter Soldier in 2014, the Russo Brothers have been on quite the marathon of directing large-budgeted films. With 4 significant credits stemming from Marvel properties and not to [...]
The Sea Beast
As the years press on, it seems as if film mediums are becoming less creative and more of a cash grab in order to rake in profits or stream clicks rather than develop a story [...]
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
The place is London, and the time is twelve years after the end of World War II. Ada Harris (Lesley Manville) works as a cleaning woman and lives alone in a small basement flat. When [...]
The Deer King
In a nation in the process of healing from the ravages of war, the ravages of a returning illness are coming to the forefront. The illness appears to be mystical in origin, but one doctor [...]