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





Reviews published in
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 [...]
Titane
French auteur in the making Julia Ducournau, one of the most promising and audacious up and coming filmmakers of the era, scripted and directed the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner Titane. A highly [...]
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 [...]
Dear Evan Hansen
Dear Hollywood, Perhaps it is time we take away any opportunity to allow Universal Pictures to greenlight big-screen adaptations of hit Broadway musicals. After the colossal failure of Tom Hooper's Cats, the latest big-screen miscalculation [...]
Kate
After taking on her last contract, she is fatally poisoned and left with only 24 hours to live. Kate, who has made a living for herself as a brutally skilled assassin, decides to use the [...]
Cry Macho
What does it mean to be a man? Clint Eastwood’s 39th directorial effort Cry Macho thoughtfully explores that question. Eastwood plays retired rodeo cowboy and horse trainer Mike Milo, who lost his wife and son [...]
Queenpins
Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly are somewhat new to the scene, directing only 2 other feature films (Beneath the Harvest Sky, The Way We Get By) that have performed moderately well and are now [...]
Malignant
James Wan has officially ran out of fucks to give. The Australian genre maestro has made a return to the genre that started his career after just a five year hiatus. A film that could [...]
The Card Counter
After the high acclaim of First Reformed (2018), iconic writer-director Paul Schrader is once again back at directing his own screenplays that continues his brilliant sensibilities of traumatized and isolated men who recount their thoughts [...]
The Protégé
Director Martin Campbell has had an interesting career, from directing gritty and exceptional spy films like Casino Royale (2006) and GoldenEye (1995) to the nearly atrocious Green Lantern (2011). But regardless of some of his [...]
2006 Retrospective: The Best Films of 2006–15 Year Anniversary
It was a time where the War in Iraq saturated the news but it was on filmmaker's minds in 2006 as well, as George W Bush's incompetence and lies were unfolding deep that year, many [...]
Worth
Sincere but dry, director Sarah Colangelo's Worth, which is set in the early 2000s, is a poignant but poky paced 9/11 drama that chronicles the story of the 9/11 Victims' Compensation Fund. A fund that [...]
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Kevin Feige and the folks over at Marvel have undoubtedly found a formula for success; the kind of formula that currently rules Hollywood with an iron fist. A formula so strong that most every film [...]
2021 Fall Movie Preview-18 New Films to See This Fall Season!
With fall just around the corner, it’s hard to determine just how many of the exceptional films I mentioned below will make the final top 10 list at the end of the year. One thing [...]
Beckett
Directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino and produced by his protégé Oscar Nominated Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, I Am Love), Netflix original Beckett staples itself as a convoluted thriller unable to consistently [...]
Flag Day
Daughter of renowned actor Sean Penn, actress and model Dylan Penn gives it her all in her father's latest directed feature Flag Day. Penn, who also has excelled as a film director in the past [...]
The Night House
David Bruckner, continues his horror sensibilities after the mixed 2017 horror film The Ritual, directed this psychological horror melodrama, starring Rebecca Hall as a depressed school teacher who suffers from recent grief due to the [...]
Candyman
Very much a legacyquel, the new cinematic incarnation of Candyman, the endlessly scary and influential horror classic of the 90's, is given life from producer/co-writer Jordan Peele and director Nia DaCosta. Making good on fusing [...]




















