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
Let Them All Talk
Acclaimed and renowned filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has always been one of the most versatile filmmakers working today, a filmmaker that bounces back and forth between studio projects to smaller indie films, and each of his [...]
I’m Your Woman
Julia Hart, the emerging indie filmmaker of "Miss Stevens" and "The Keeping Room" crafts her most mainstream movie to date with "I'm Your Woman," a taut crime thriller that blends character study and feminist commentary [...]
Black Bear
Lawrence Michael Levine is a part of the second generation of mumblecore filmmakers. Mumblecore is a “genre” of film in a way, but more so was a group of filmmakers that came up in the [...]
Sound of Metal
While having made its initial premiere at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, Sound of Metal, the feature length debut from filmmaker Darius Marder, is almost eerily timely for 2020. In a year such as [...]
David Fincher Retrospective (Film Rankings from Worst to Best)
Easily one of the greatest film artisans of our time, film director David Fincher has had a film directing spanning nearly thirty years. Fincher holds an impressive framework of films mostly involving protagonists who endure [...]
Happiest Season
Even though same sex attraction is something that has been with the human race most likely since the dawn of humanity—I’m sure cavemen weren’t only clubbing cavewomen, if ya know what I mean—I have never [...]
Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on the Exorcist
‘The Exorcist’ is one of the most iconic films in film history, and quite frankly, one of the most iconic pieces of art in general. Most people have no doubt come across one of the [...]
Hillbilly Elegy
For every major awards contender, your Parasite's and Joker's of the year, also comes an occasional The Goldfinch. Ron Howard's latest outing, based on the New York Times bestselling novel "Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of [...]
Ham On Rye
When I was in my late teens, I remember saying to my friends on a couple of occasions, that I felt like our lives were a movie; the late nite Denny’s parking lot hangouts, the [...]
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
After it's unprecedented global success of "Borat," Sacha Baron Cohen's iconic character went onto to be celebrated in pop culture around the world. A cartoonish stereotype, the Borat character was a pure embodiment of American's [...]