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
The Lighthouse
After making a big splash with both critics and audiences with his directorial debut “The Witch”, writer/director Robert Eggers has returned with the anticipated nautical nightmare, “The Lighthouse”. Shot on actual 35mm Black and White [...]
Pain and Glory
Every so often do we see a great auteur do their own riff on Federico Fellini's "8 1/2", the 1963 masterpiece movie that ultimately launched the meta, film within a film approach that would be [...]
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
Five years ago, Angelina Jolie starred in a live action remake of Disney’s classic film, Sleeping Beauty. But this time, the film told the origins of the film’s villain, the titular Maleficent. The film presented [...]
Gemini Man
Director Ang Lee has always been known to push boundaries in his work. Whether it be the breathtaking "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", "Brokeback Mountain" or more recently with 2012's "Life of Pi". Lee has had [...]
Zombieland: Double Tap
Zombieland, USA, 2019. 10 years have passed since we last saw our heroes Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abagail Breslin). In the time spent since the first film, [...]
The Laundromat
Steven Soderbergh explores the true-life, largely reported Panama Papers scandal with his second feature released this year, "The Laundromat", though with a first-rate cast, the end results are very dull and never cohesive. Taking the [...]
The Addams Family
The Addams Family has existed since the late 1930s. Created to be an inversion of the ideal American family, they are depicted as a band of creepy, ghoulish people whose interests deal with rather macabre [...]
First Love
Prolific (and often provocative) auteur director Takashi Miike pulls no punches, literally, with his latest film “First Love.” At the jump we see a man’s beheading- another casualty of the long standing gang war between [...]
Rob Zombie Retrospective – Film Rankings (Worst to Best)
Rob Zombie; Hard rock icon, genre film enthusiast and one of the most unlikely auteur filmmakers of the 21st century. Zombie has forged a name for himself in the genre film community and is often [...]
Abominable
In the city of Shanghai, young teen Yi (Chloe Bennet) longs for a life of adventure in the aftermath of her father’s death. She spends her days doing odd jobs around the city to earn [...]
3 From Hell
It’s been nearly 15 years since the release of “The Devil’s Rejects”, the unlikely sequel to writer/director Rob Zombie’s first feature, “House of 1,000 Corpses”. “Rejects”, a film that polarized critics and audiences alike with [...]
The Goldfinch
As a child, Theo (Oakes Fegley) had a close relationship with his mother. He’s a bright kid with a promising future. That is until one day, when a visit to the art museum ends with [...]
The Nightingale
15 minutes into "The Nightingale" involves a brutal murder, two rapes and an infant baby being thrown into the walls of a cabin. It is completely horrifying to endure. In fact its possibly the most [...]