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
Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry
We've seen pop stars come and go with varying degrees of success and pop culture impact throughout the past, but never have we seen one come in the form of Billie Eilish. The 18 year-old [...]
The United States vs. Billie Holiday
The melodramatic detours and pokey pacing in The United States vs. Billie Holiday certainly speaks to Lee Daniels sensibilities, overwrought and overstuffed with many raw emotions, and is conventional to the demise from fame, and [...]
I Care a Lot
Another satire on capitalism and the corruption of the American dream, I Care a Lot is a playful, but deliberately mean-spirited dark comedy about greed and determination that defies audience expectations. A film that examines [...]
Test Pattern
We just recently had the highly acclaimed Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman's small-budget indie masterpiece that also explored women reproductive rights, for Test Pattern, the film also explores women's healthcare challenges and is every [...]
Happy Valentine’s Day from Defacto–55 Great Films About Human Connection
Covid has been very difficult for single people, as I'm sure some of you can imagine. If anything, it has probably created many to feel even more alone as we are now living in times [...]
Judas and the Black Messiah
The story of the Black Panthers, particularly that of its Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton, hasn't been as well-publicized in recent decades as it should. Take this writer for example, a white millennial (admittedly a year [...]
Duck You Sucker (Spotlight Review) 50th Anniversary!
One of the Best Film of 1971!! Sergio Leone's final western, the 1971 saga "Duck You Sucker," also known as "A Fistful of Dynamite" is a triumphant masterpiece that features perhaps the most stellar casting, [...]
Malcolm & Marie
Malcolm (John David Washington), an up-and-coming film director, and his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya) a former actress, return home late after a successful film premiere. Off the high of strong buzz and acclaim, Malcolm feels on [...]
The Little Things
A neo-noir crime thriller about a serial killer that terrifies female victims in Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley, The Little Things, writer-director John Lee Hancock's latest film is of course a taut and psychological [...]
Little Fish
Morris from America, director Chad Hartigan utilizes small resources of his science-fiction genre piece to explore the themes of love, loss, memory, and disease. His third feature Little Fish is very ambitious, grounded in an intimate [...]
Sundance Film Festival 2021 Coverage: Day Two
Day two of our Sundance 2021 coverage includes review for I Was a Simple Man, John and the Hole and In the Earth. Keep checking throughout the week for more reviews. I Was a Simple [...]
Sundance Film Festival 2021 Coverage: Day One
With this year's Sundance Film Festival taking place virtually, we were able to "attend" the festival this year. Throughout each day of Sundance, we'll give you reviews of all the films we see each day. [...]
Review Round Up 1/27
This past month has been quite busy over here on DeFacto, and there were quite a few films we weren't able to make time for. So to make up for the lack of time, here's [...]
Film About a Father Who
Families hold many complexities and dysfunctions. Stories are often passed on from person to person, and many times it leads to siblings, mothers, fathers, and other members to feel bitter, but it can also be [...]
The White Tiger
Ramin Bahrani's screen version of Arvind Adiga's best-selling novel is certainly hit-or-miss, a visceral, tragic melodrama that plods along with many sudden tonal shifts from scene to scene, while leaving some emotional pull, the film [...]
Locked Down
Timely but implausible, stylish but inconsistent, Doug Liman's "Locked Down" is a modernist narrative that's setting is during the early stages of the COVID-19 lock down, an amalgam of many tonal shifts: screwball comedy, modern [...]