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
Toy Story 4
I’m sure like most of you, the “Toy Story” films have meant a great deal. Whether you watched them as a child, or have just been a fan of the films, the series has been [...]
Men in Black: International
In 1997, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones starred in the science fiction/comedy film Men in Black. The movie was based loosely on the Marvel Comics property of the same name, which itself was based [...]
The Secret Life of Pets 2
In 2016, Illumination Studios released their first original animated film since the original Despicable Me, a family film titled The Secret Life of Pets. Designed to focus on what our pets do when we leave [...]
Dark Phoenix
As the Disney/Fox merger has now begun its empire, there remains one last X-Men film in the Fox pipeline — unless we ever get to see “The New Mutants” — before Disney completely reboots the [...]
The Souvenir
An extraordinary and deeply personal exploration on deep memories and experiences, British writer-director Joanna Hogg's fourth feature film, "The Souvenir" is an astonishing origin story that is deeply auto-biographical, and the vision on display in [...]
Non-Fiction
Greatly influenced by the works of Erik Rohmer that also plays out like an excellent Woody Allen comedy like "Husbands and Wives", French auteur Olivier Assayas has crafted a sharply written, greatly acted, and richly [...]
Under the Silver Lake
I really wanted to rate "Under the Silver Lake" a higher rating, in fact there is a lot to love about the film. It is technically marvelous, aesthetically rich, beautifully shot, and Andrew Garfield once [...]
Brightburn
Most superhero movies are based on comic books, we’re pretty familiar with that. The characters with fully established fan bases are the films that are guaranteed to make the most money in theaters. That’s why [...]
Michigan Short Film Round-Up (May 2019 Edition)
Short films just as feature films invoke emotions. Sadly there isn't much of a market for short films since there are so many of them, and people prefer to not spend their hard earned money [...]
A Dog’s Journey
Two years ago, we received A Dog’s Purpose, a family-friendly comedy about a dog named Bailey. Voiced by the perfectly cast Josh Gad, Bailey attempts to find out what his purpose is on Earth as [...]
Pokémon: Detective Pikachu
The Pokémon franchise has been with us ever since the mid-90s, and has gone on to become a staple of people’s childhoods. Kids everyone, at some point, find themselves in possession of Pokémon cards, or [...]
Ash Is Purest White
An official selection at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it was in competition for the Palme D'Or that went to Hirokazu Kore-eda's masterpiece, "Shoplifters" (placed 3rd in my top 10 last year), yet the [...]
The Intruder
Screen Gems, a division of Sony, has made a solid track record of churning out mid budget, campy, stalker thrillers over the past decade. 2009’s, Beyonce-starring, “Obsessed”, 2015’s “The Perfect Guy” and 2016’s “When [...]
Avengers: Endgame (Spoiler-Free)
After the devastating loss at the hands (fingers?) of Thanos (Josh Brolin) that turned half of all living creatures into dust, we find our heroes desperate and reeling from the biggest loss imaginable. Just to [...]