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
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
Recent years have not been kind to the Wizarding World brand. From creator JK Rowling sabotaging her legacy, outing herself as a transphobic bigot. There’s the ongoing legal troubles for Johnny Depp, forcing the studio [...]
Paris, 13th District
An elegantly made, playful, intimate, and ultimately sincere take on love in the modern era that consists of dating apps, social media, hook-ups, friends with benefits, and other newfound desires, Jacques Audiard's visually slick and [...]
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Ever since video games took the world by storm with their beyond imaginative worlds and beautifully written narratives, Hollywood has been yearning to turn a profit by creating film adaptations of them. But just like [...]
1997 Retrospective: The Best Films of 1997
The monumental film of the time was James Cameron's Titanic, which broke box-office records and won 11 Oscars; including best picture and director. It was a landmark piece of cinema that ended up being a [...]
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The absurdist duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka The Daniels) conjures up a dizzying, formally visual, and messy metaphysical confection of many bombastic ideas in Everything Everywhere All at Once, that appear to [...]
The Bubble
What do you get when an out-of-touch director directs an insufferably awful screenplay? You’re given a painfully long film that feels as if it should have never left the drawing board. Entering the pool of [...]
You Won’t Be Alone
The first feature from director Goran Stolevski, You Won’t Be Alone is far from a traditional narrative film. Instead, this Australian/Macedonian co-production is a uniquely constructed sensory experience through Macedonian folklore that slowly unfurls into [...]
Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
Following up with critically acclaimed hits like Dazed and Confused, Boyhood, and Everybody Wants Some, Richard Linklater demonstrated how fondly he remembers his youth and how much he draws from his past experiences. He's always [...]
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 [...]