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
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 [...]
The Tender Bar
Releasing along the tail of December, George Clooney directs a film adapted from a memoir written by J.R. Moehringer back in 2005, The Tender Bar: A Memoir. It came as a surprise to me seeing [...]
Scream (2022)
Wes Craven's original masterpiece, Scream was a true turning point for the horror genre. As the genre saw the fall of the once-mighty slasher, writer Kevin Williamson flipped the genre upside down with his script known [...]
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 [...]
