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
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 [...]
Don’t Worry Darling
Actress-turned-filmmaker Olivia Wilde reached a rare career high after shifting gears from acting to directing her feature film, the teen comedy, Booksmart. While not lighting the box office on fire, the film quickly garnered a [...]
God’s Country
The atmospheric and sophisticated sensibilities of Sam Peckinpah, Tyler Sheridan, and even Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky levitate potently over Julian Higgin's God's Country, a restrained neo-western that takes its time with its slow-burn build-up, [...]
The Woman King
The historical battle epic is a Hollywood staple. So too is the manipulation of historical stories or the softening of edges to make a story more palatable or reassuring to a mass audience. Gina Prince- [...]
See How They Run
Some impressive work by a splendid cast, along with a breezy pace, delivers most of the deflections in See How They Run, a comic murder whodunit that's very much influenced by the style of Wes [...]
Pinocchio (2022)
Just when you thought the Mouse House conglomerate had run out of films to slavishly retell in live-action form, guess again. The newest live-action remake of a beloved animated film comes in the form of [...]
Moonage Daydream
Moonage Daydream is an innovative documentary that emphasizes the myths and rebuilds the legacy of one of rock music's most iconic and artistic songwriters and musicians, we all know as David Bowie. The late David [...]
Clerks III
Right from the beginning of Clerks III, the film opens up just like the beginning of the original Clerks (1994), as we're back at The Quick Shop in its Leonardo, New Jersey setting, where life [...]
Funny Pages
Too mean-spirited and overly subversive for its own good, Funny Pages, Owen Kline's (the son of Kevin Kline and actress Phoebe Cates) feature film directorial debut, is an anti-coming-of-age story that benefits from its deadpan [...]
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
With names such as Jordan Peele and Daniel Kaluuya attached as producers and tons of buzz coming out of Sundance, it's not hard to get to excited at the idea of a satire on rich [...]
