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Oct 5, 201270Butter might have been a dark comedy; here, the humor is twisted but the world is bright as can be. Conservatives and liberals alike take a licking, and yet the art of butter carving emerges unscathed.
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70The film grows increasingly mirthful as the characters come into focus, and the casting is the key: Ms. Garner, who also helped produce the film, has a gift for catty roles, and Ms. Wilde is so funny she should play hookers all the time.
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70With a razor-sharp script and Jennifer Garner winning laughs in a nice change-of-pace role, this cynically funny and pointedly pertinent not-so-subtle spin on the national battle between right and left wing politics scores lots of comic bullseyes.
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Oct 5, 201265Butter thrives on skewering characters whose self-importance isolates them completely from the consequences of their actions. And while the film's perspective is distinctly liberal, providing several thinly veiled criticisms of conservative politicians, nearly everyone (except Destiny) is guilty of something.
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Sep 19, 201260There's something about this film's churn of goo and grit that lingers ambivalently, difficult to digest.
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50With both Garner and Shahedi providing voice-over, the small-town stakes and the big thematic ideas, Butter feels like someone trying to create the lemonade tang and quenching zest of, say, Alexander Payne's "Election."
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Oct 4, 201250The would-be satire is nothing more than a bunch of sketch characters and jokes welded to a sentimental subplot.
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50Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.
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50The chance for delicious satire melts away quickly in Butter, a spoof without oomph.
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Oct 4, 201250Butter is funny in spots, but it's so preoccupied with landing below-the-belt cultural jabs that it misses the opportunity for laying out biting social commentary.
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Oct 4, 201250It's the film's unwillingness to deal with the sometimes hilarious and often problematic things its characters say and do that stands as one of its ultimate failings.
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50Garner hasn't come across as amusing as she is here in quite some time. Despite many funny bits, Butter also, at times, seems to excoriate the blinkered Midwesterners in the flyover states.
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50The film was shot in Louisiana, which looks nothing like Iowa. Nobody along the way seems to have a care in the world about cholesterol. And it's the first movie in history that makes Hugh Jackman look repulsive.
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40Appropriately enough for a movie built on two-dimensional cartoons of amoral adults and innocent children, Shahidi is the only actor who emerges with her dignity fully intact.
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40If its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.
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38It's been a long time since a movie wasted this much talent.
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38Butter dearly wants to be a hot-button social satire that plays rough with sacred cows: Midwestern power-moms, the religious right, race, sex, you name it. Mostly, it wants to be an Alexander Payne movie from the 1990s. "Citizen Ruth," say, or "Election." Instead, it's a shrill, cartoonish mess.
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33A toothless, insufferably smug satire using competitive butter-carving as a weak-tea stand-in for Midwestern politics, Butter is so contemptuous of its corn-fed rubes, it might as well be a Trojan horse crafted to prove the movie industry's liberal bias.
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33Self-righteous and smug in its use of heartland stereotypes, the movie backfires by assuming that its intended liberal audience is just as intolerant and condescending as the conservative opposition insists it is.
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30Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.
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25It's another in the bicoastal indie industry's endless series of self-congratulatory comedies about the alleged dopiness of middle American hicks who do things like read Parade magazine and decorate with flags.
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25Butter is a misfire. At 90 minutes it feels inflated, and though clearly intended as funny, it's difficult to locate, except in the most general terms, the focus of the movie's satire, and there's not a laugh to be had.
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Oct 5, 201220Butter essentially eats its own premise, then proceeds to bludgeon us with unfunny, unoriginal political satire.