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
Fall Movie Preview 2022
With September approaching, the fall movie season will begin this Friday. It's also a monumental season for the big fall film festivals, as the Venice Film Festival kicks off this week, followed by Toronto, and [...]
Three Thousand Years of Longing
The first film since George Miller made a monumental critical and commercial splash with Mad Max: Fury Road just 7 years ago, Three Thousand Years of Longing features all the aspects you would want in [...]
Orphan: First Kill
Rhoda the Bad Seed, Damien, Regan, The Grady Twins, The Children of the Corn and a multitude of others. Creepy children are a long-standing tradition of horror cinema. When Orphan came out in 2009, it [...]
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 [...]