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
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 [...]
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 [...]
