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 Rescue
In 2018, news that a Thailand soccer team consisting of 12 adolescent boys and their coach were trapped in a flooded cave was heard worldwide. Day after day, updates would be made about the well-being [...]
Mulholland Drive (Spotlight Review) 20th Anniversary!
The cautionary tale of Hollywood and what lies beneath the surface of all the glitz, glamour, and stardom underlies a very dark, seedy, and cutthroat world. 20 years later, David Lynch's 2001 masterpiece is every [...]
There’s Someone Inside Your House
With Halloween around the corner, slashers and thrillers are being released at their usual pace this time of year. And with Netflix keeping their promise to release a film every week, a brand new slasher [...]
Possession (Spotlight Review) 40th Anniversary!
Now being re-released theatrically with a pristine 4k restoration in celebration of its 40th anniversary by Metrograph Pictures, the cult following of Andrzej Zulawski's 1981 psychological horror film Possession should reach an even wider audience [...]
The Velvet Underground
A innovative, often informative chronicle of the iconic rock band The Velvet Underground who gained notoriety during the 1960s counterculture movement, The Velvet Underground is the first documentary (and tenth feature) by auteur filmmaker Todd [...]
Bergman Island
Mia Hansen-Løve follows up her acclaimed and artful French dramas Things to Come, Eden, and Goodbye First Love, with Bergman Island, another ambiguous, clever, dreamy, and meta-driven script she also wrote, that's setting is on [...]
Halloween Kills
Delivering on its amusingly blunt title, Halloween Kills does exactly that; it kills, and quite brutally. Through all the previous eleven films in the franchise -- ten, if you exclude Season of the Witch -- [...]
The Last Duel
In its visual grandeur and operatic style, The Last Duel, Ridley Scott's highly anticipated medieval epic that Scott has attempted to recapture the glory of his Oscar winning Best Picture winner many times with ambitious [...]
2011 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2011
Each time I do these retrospectives I go all the way back and revisit many films that were released in the given year. I found that there was a common theme in nearly each of [...]
The Addams Family 2
The Addams are a family who, despite their bizarre attributes, continue to live a “normal” life amongst the many people who see how idiosyncratic this family really is. But they embrace their strange behavior and [...]
No Time To Die
Every generation has their James Bond(s). For my father it was Sean Connery as a kid, Roger Moore as a teen. The goofier gadgets, bodacious woman and campy storylines were the ultimate escapist fantasy for [...]
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Somewhat surprisingly Venom: Let There Be Carnage, the sequel to the almost-billion dollar grossing meh-fest that was Venom, is a good deal of fun. Taking from the strengths of its predecessor which did have some notable [...]
The Many Saints of Newark
After nearly 15 years since its final episode date, The Sopranos has remained widely known as one of the best TV shows of all time, exploring the depths of characters intricately and developing a story [...]
The Guilty (2021)
The principles that seem to be working for Antoine Fuqua's filmography these days is just how versatile he is in the projects he's hired to direct, and most of the time he pulls off very [...]
Blue Bayou
In the recent wake of political discourse, Justin Chon writes, directs and stars in his new feature, Blue Bayou that covers an overlooked problem that is the unfair treatment of immigrant adoptees and the flawed [...]
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
The life of Tammy Faye Bakker is the kind of true-blue American story that is so bizarre and larger-than-life, it's only fitting to be a passion project for someone of star/producer Jessica Chastain's caliber. The [...]