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
47 Meters Down: Uncaged
The story of 2017's "47 Meters Down" is an interesting one to say the least. Initially titled "In the Deep", the original film was set straight to the DVD bin from the Weinstein Company and [...]
Fall Movie Preview 2019–16 Titles to Get Excited For
As summer is coming close to an end, 2019 has been a stacked this year with many great offerings such as Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", Nuri Bilge Ceylan's little seen "The [...]
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
For many of us, the Scary Stories books were a critical stepping stone in our adolescence. Seen as the middle ground between Goosebumps and Stephen King, these books lit the imagination of young readers ablaze, [...]
Dora and the Lost City of Gold
Disney isn’t the only studio turning their beloved animated properties into live action. Nickelodeon is also getting in on that. The studio has made an entire industry out of people’s nostalgia for the pop culture [...]
The Art of Self-Defense
Writer-director Riley Stearns is obviously an admirer of martial arts, and with his sophomore feature "The Art of Self-Defense" he could have showed how noble things like self-defense and martial arts get co-opted by power, [...]
The Farewell
Following her debut 2014 romantic dramedy "Posthumous", Chinese filmmaker Lulu Wang sophomore film "The Farewell" continues her quirky traits merged with deep characters, and the film holds many great influences that consist of Sofia Coppola, early Ang [...]
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
by Ben Rothrock The Fast & Furious franchise has been with us for almost 20 years at this point, and it is still going strong. After the last two entries, Furious 7 and The Fate [...]
Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino's 9th feature film, that is heavily borrowed from the title of Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West" titled "Once Upon A Time In Hollywood" is a deft and masterfully made [...]
The Lion King
The Lion King is undoubtedly one of Disney’s most perfect films, and certainly one of the highlights of their last renaissance. It contains the most stunning example of their classic, traditional animation, as well as [...]
Robert Joseph Butler’s Love Immortal: Screening Information
As some of you may know, Defacto Film Reviews founder and chief critic, Robert Joseph Butler has been working tirelessly over the past year on his first feature, Love Immortal. Starring Aphrodite Nikolovski (The Girl [...]
Spider-Man: Far From Home
As the first entry in the MCU post "Avengers: Endgame", “Spider-Man: Far From Home” understandably has much to live up to. Having to pick up the pieces and continue on the franchise after such a [...]
Too Old to Die Young
The versatile and innovative Amazon Prime brings Nicholas Winding Refn's new series "Too Old to Die Young" to its streaming service, which debuted on June 14th, and I am sure they are hoping it will [...]
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
The timing for a film like "The Last Black Man in San Francisco" is right. Cities like San Francisco across American have been changing, due to mass migration along with the influx of banks and [...]
The Dead Don’t Die
Jim Jarmusch's thirteenth feature film is a zombie film, but it is far from being brainless, but its also not that fun or as clever as it thinks it is. It holds ideas, however the [...]
Child’s Play (2019)
With a remake of a film whose franchise is still going (and quite strongly, for that matter), the skepticism was real for this new adaptation of “Child’s Play”. Original creator, Dan Mancini, has taken his franchise [...]