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
The Best Films of 2021-Robert Butler
It was a year for looking back and documenting a specific time and era. Perhaps filmmakers wanted audiences to escape our modern, COVID reduced world as democracy appears to be brittle and under attack. Regardless [...]
Parallel Mothers
Writer-director Pedro Almodovar continues his sweeping melodrama streak with Parallel Mothers--the story of two single women who meet at a hospital when they are both about to give birth--is an entirely involving exploration of regret, [...]
The Tragedy of Macbeth
With his first attempt at adapting Shakespeare while going solo for the first time in his career without the involvement of his brother Ethan Coen, Joel Coen has delivered an intense, bone-crunching, brilliantly staged rendition [...]
The Lost Daughter
A dramatically satisfying drama about dissatisfied people attempting to escape from their regrets, The Lost Daughter shows actress-turned filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal some impressive strengths that were already evident in her creative performances in numerous indies [...]
Red Rocket
Sean Baker has done it once again by remarkably delivering another raw and authentic character study related to American subculture and exploration of socio economics, Red Rocket shakes up the dark comedy genre to refreshing [...]
Licorice Pizza
Deeply moving, highly engaging, and technically brilliant, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ninth feature, Licorice Pizza, is the most enthralling and thrilling film to be released this year. A chronicle of first love in Southern California circa [...]
The Matrix Resurrections
2021 marks a resurgence for many franchises, but like many, they aren't quite as brilliant as before. The same can be said for The Matrix Resurrections, the welcome sequel to the iconic 1999 sci-fi action [...]
The Hand of God
Considerably scaled down in scope and visual energy from his previous Oscar nominated existential films, The Great Beauty and Youth, Paulo Sorrentino's The Hand of God is an artfully crafted and deeply personal coming-of-age-story that [...]
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Not since The Force Awakens and Avengers: Endgame has Hollywood gone into such spoiler lockdown mode, and for good reason. Revealing anything beyond what's featured in the marketing would not only come with the threat [...]
Nightmare Alley
In a far darker return to more macabre terrain after his Oscar win for The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro still finds his footing in genre filmmaking in the thrilling Nightmare Alley. Adapted from [...]
Being the Ricardos
Though Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's stardom has faded in the 30 years since their deaths, Aaron Sorkin's biopic casts the late, iconic duo with some marital dynamics under the bright lights of show business. [...]
Don’t Look Up
Messy, overlong but also deeply satirical, Don't Look Up plays like an extended SNL skit. Adam McKay's follow-up to Vice, and his most satirical political film yet, amounts to a take action cry of "Americans, [...]
West Side Story
Steven Spielberg has previously dabbled in the visual rhythms of musical theater -- see the opening of Temple of Doom for a prime example -- but has never made a full fledged musical. His adaptation [...]
Drive My Car
A chronicle of grief, healing, and the power of the creative process are all familiar themes we have seen numerous times before, but rarely are they executed with the delicateness, resentment, tenderness, and hope that [...]
