Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
An adopted girl discovers her talent for butter carving and finds herself pitted against an ambitious local woman in their Iowa town's annual contest.
Butter is a quirky political satire wrapped in an unlikely premise about competitive butter carving in Iowa. The cast is solid—Jennifer Garner commits fully to her cartoonishly ambitious antagonist and there are capable supporting turns—but the script struggles to land its satirical punches consistently, often feeling half-baked. The premise is genuinely novel and the film has a distinctive comedic voice, but the execution is uneven, the cinematography is functional at best, and the ending wraps up too neatly without much payoff for the political commentary it sets up.