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
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 [...]
Smiling Friends (Adult Swim)
Adult Swim quietly launched the first season of their hit new show Smiling Friends on HBO Max late Tuesday night (or really early Wednesday morning, depending on how you want to look at it). That [...]
Death on the Nile
Kenneth Branagh’s 2017 adaptation of the classic Agatha Christie novel Murder on the Orient Express did a capable enough job at bringing the iconic story to life for a modern age and introducing audiences to [...]
Jackass Forever
It’s been nearly 12 years since the Jackass crew came together to bless us with a cinematic offering of blissful debauchery. In that time, the gents have all hit 40 and are even approaching their [...]
The Worst Person in the World
There's a reason for the film's title, but to think the main character is some one-dimensional woman who hurts, betrays, and eventually finds redemption in the full circle of things is one of the many [...]
Italian Studies
The idea of being deprived of your identity and self-worth in the blink of an eye, traversing through the big city of Manhattan is bound to create some adventures. Italian Studies explores the somewhat outlandish [...]