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
Oscar Predictions 2022
The Academy Awards will be televised a little earlier than they were last year, but it's already set to be a failure after years of declining ratings, Twitter backlash from the Academy's decision not to [...]
The Lost City
Adventure films haven’t had the best go-around recently. Intending to harken back to the good ol’ days of Hollywood filmmaking, when original films were at the forefront, recent cinematic examples include the abhorrent Red Notice, [...]
Infinite Storm
Many films about survival have merged natural landscapes with the themes of man versus nature--or in this case, woman versus nature--where characters find themselves under brutal and very hazardous weather conditions and scenarios; we have [...]
4th Annual Defacto Film Awards
To celebrate the upcoming Oscars, we are pleased to announce the Best of 2021 nominees and winners in eighteen categories. We selected the top five picks in the following categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best [...]
Deep Water
Well, there is one thing that can be said about director Adrian Lyne, he seems obsessed with the themes of infidelity and the unfaithfulness of significant others in his films. From his 1987 film Fatal [...]
The Outfit
An impressively written and wrought gangster thriller set in 1950s Chicago that is both dramatic and suspenseful, The Outfit marks the directorial debut of Oscar winning American screenwriter and author Graham Moore (The Imitation Game). [...]
The Adam Project
Reuniting with the director of the financially successful, but creatively bankrupt, Free Guy, director Shawn Levy, leading man Ryan Reynolds has chosen yet another starring vehicle that relies heavily on his wise-cracking bravado that’s become [...]
Turning Red
As someone who has paid close attention to Pixar’s depiction and representation of people of color over the years, it always comes as a delightful surprise to see announcements of films including various ethnicities. This [...]
After Yang
The kind of sci-fi film that can easily be labeled as a thinking person's sci-fi, After Yang is a futuristic, emotionally tender sci-fi saga that merges innovative technology of the future with an emotionally genuine [...]
The Batman
What was once a solo project for Ben Affleck has now morphed into an entirely new adaptation of the Caped Crusader, one that stands apart from the current DC extended universe. This Batman, helmed by [...]
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
As the ninth film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, the aptly-titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre, heading straight to Netflix, won’t win any points for originality, keeping in line with the recent trend of legacyquels such [...]
Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming
After planning on retiring the character in 2019’s A Madea Family Funeral, writer/producer/star/director Tyler Perry has decided to return to his golden goose, the now-iconic, gun-totting, wise-cracking, wisdom-giving grandmother, Madea, this time moving to the [...]
2002 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2002
2002, if nothing else, was a stellar year for genre reinvention. While audiences were lining up in doves for fantasy epics and superheroes way back in 2002 with The Lord of the Rings: The Two [...]
