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Metascore
23 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 70Boxoffice MagazinePete HammondBoxoffice MagazinePete HammondWith 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.
- There's something about this film's churn of goo and grit that lingers ambivalently, difficult to digest.
- 50Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenGarner 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.
- 50Slant MagazineSlant MagazineIt'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.
- 50Arizona RepublicArizona RepublicButter 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.
- 40Time OutDavid FearTime OutDavid FearIf its juxtaposition of bad behavior and dairy products leaves you stone-faced or wearily sighing, you should exit the theater posthaste.
- 40New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanNew York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanAppropriately 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.
- 33Entertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumEntertainment WeeklyLisa SchwarzbaumSelf-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.
- 33The A.V. ClubSam AdamsThe A.V. ClubSam AdamsA 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.