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
Black Widow
The long-awaited solo outing for Natasha Romanoff AKA Black Widow has hit a few speed bumps along its way to release, as has most tentpole films over the past 16 months. While the MCU has [...]
False Positive
Stand up comedian Iliana Glazer gets to showcase her dramatic chops in TV director John Lee's sophomore feature film, False Positive. A fresh cinematic face where she gets the opportunity to shine in more of [...]
No Sudden Move
Prolific auteur Steven Soderbergh always takes great liberties stylistically and visually, no matter what film he's crafting, or what genre he dives into. His latest film to hit HBO Max, No Sudden Move is a [...]
Good on Paper
liza Shlesinger's amusing but clunky Good on Paper, directed by actress and Hollywood TV director, Kimmy Gatewood, is mostly a clever and highly watchable rom-com that is now streaming on Netflix. With a breezy pace [...]
F9: The Fast Saga
The Fast & Furious franchise has had one of the stranger journeys in any modern film franchise. What started out centering on illegal street racing in the streets of LA, to the streets of Tokyo, [...]
1996 Retrospective: The 10 Best Films of 1996
More so than usual, reflecting back at the year 1996 it was truly a year of independent filmmaking. Executive Producers were able to raise cash with smaller films, headlined in the aftermath of Quentin Tarantino's [...]
Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard
Comedy sequels tend to not have the best reputation, and for good reason. For every 22 Jump Street or Hot Shots Part Deux, there's a Caddyshack 2, Zoolander 2, Weekend At Bernie's 2, hell, even [...]
Summer of 85
Summer of 85, Francois Ozon's latest film is a sensually tragic, involving, deeply flawed, and cautionary saga of first love, based on the 1982 novel Dance On My Grave by British author Aiden Chambers. Very [...]
In the Heights
In the Heights, the screen version of the highly successful Broadway musical written by Quira Alegria Hudes and Lin-Manuel Mirananda, is a very energetic film musical that should please audiences of the genre, largely due [...]
The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
It's hard not to go into The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It with a bit of skepticism. Conjuring 1 & 2 filmmaker James Wan, while serving as a producer and shares a story [...]
Port Authority
It's quite liberating and remarkable how in the last few years or so, transgender representation in cinema, television, and other forms of media is beginning to get true representation in the medium. Between Laverne Cox [...]
A Quiet Place Part 2
The 2018 smash hit, A Quiet Place, was the kind of success no one saw coming. A fairly low budget genre film starring one of the Hollywood's most treasured "it couples" in Emily Blunt and [...]
Riders of Justice
Structured as an action thriller, Riders of Justice, Anders Thomas-Jensen latest Danish contribution to the crime thriller, is an entertaining character-driven story that offers some characterization and sophisticated themes with the bloodshed. Despite drifting in [...]
The Killing of Two Lovers
The Killing of Two Lovers is a domestic drama that aims to explore a collapsed marriage that also holds the mood and atmosphere of a slow-burn thriller. The Killing of Two Lovers has the creepy [...]
Army of the Dead
If you've seen any film from director Zack Snyder, you'll know the man knows how to open a film with a bang. Snyder's latest epic, Army of the Dead, the first Netflix film to [...]