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
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 [...]
The Best Films of 2020 – Noah Damron
2020 was unquestionably the most difficult year for us as a collective whole. Through the unimaginable hardships some of us have had to endure, to the newfound outlook of being hunkered away at home for [...]
The Best Films of 2020 – Robert Butler
As regularly, the best surprises came in smaller packages: One year after the foreign-language film "Parasite" wowed audiences, critics, and Oscar voters, foreign language films continued to reign supreme with such elegant titles like "To [...]
Pieces of a Woman
Life partners and creative duo Kornel Mundruczo and Kata Weber, known for idiosyncratic work such as White God and Jupiter's Moon, have tapped into a highly personal story with their latest effort, Pieces of a Woman. [...]
One Night in Miami
Empowering in ideas and full of compelling moments, "One Night in Miami" isn't your comprehensive biopic or period piece of the celebrated historical icons on display in Regina King's directorial debut. Instead, screenwriter Kemp Powers [...]
Ghost Tropic
Bas Devos's hypnotic and woozy Belgium film centers on a middle-aged Muslim woman, a widow, who gets lost during the late hours in Brussels. The film becomes very dreamlike and humanistic as it observes in [...]
News of the World by Ian Courtney
We live in an age of information overload. Twitter feeds, Instagram stories, Reddit threads, Facebook posts, podcasts, streaming services, text messages, email, etc; they are all coming at us a mile a minute. Though it’s [...]
Promising Young Woman
It's rare for a film to embody a sense of style and attitude within the very first minute; or in the case of Promising Young Woman, the first directorial feature from Killing Eve producer, Emerald [...]
Wonder Woman 1984
Caught somewhere between Richard Donner’s Superman and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984. The boisterous sequel to the milestone 2017 hit ups the ante with exciting new characters and a new period [...]
To the Ends of the Earth
There are many ways to process "To the Ends of the Earth," easily one of the most artful and enjoyable films of 2020, which sadly is going under the radar in the large sea of [...]
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The most recent film adaptation of playwright August Wilson's work was 2016's Fences. Helmed by and starring Denzel Washington, the adaptation was a major critical success and awarded Viola Davis with her long-overdue Oscar. Four [...]
Martin Eden
Centering on one man's artistry and quest to making a career out of writing, played with charisma, rawness, and endless intensity by Italian actor Luca Marinelli, "Martin Eden," an Italian sprawling epic of creativity and [...]
Another Round
"Another Round" offers a unique glimpse into the world of alcoholism that is rarely shown on film. It's a character driven film that gives a glimpse into one man's journey from isolation to loosening himself [...]