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Spinning Into Butter (2009)

tomatometer

15

Average Rating: 3.6/10
Reviews Counted: 33
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 28

Both leaden and stilted, Spinning into Butter is an unsubtle drama with stagy direction and lackluster dialogue.

7

Average Rating: 3.2/10
Critic Reviews: 14
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 13

Both leaden and stilted, Spinning into Butter is an unsubtle drama with stagy direction and lackluster dialogue.

audience

34

liked it
Average Rating: 2.7/5
User Ratings: 310

My Rating

Movie Info

A vicious hate crime at an elite New England college thrusts the new dean of students into the investigation. When charged with maintaining order on campus, she is forced to examine her own feelings about race. Based on the critically acclaimed play, "Spinning into Butter" is a compelling movie that examines the emotional fallout of prejudice within the cloistered walls of academia.

R, 1 hr. 26 min.

Drama

Doug Atchison, Rebecca Gilman

Jun 9, 2009

Screen Media Films

All Critics (36) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (29) | DVD (1)

The biggest lesson from Spinning Into Butter has nothing to do with the ethics of race and more with realizing that every hit play doesn't need to be turned into a movie.

April 17, 2009 Full Review Source: Dallas Morning News | Comment
Dallas Morning News
Top Critic IconTop Critic

It feels like an after school special.

March 30, 2009 Full Review Source: At the Movies | Comment
At the Movies
Top Critic IconTop Critic

This movie would've been bad in 1983, but at least it would've been original.

March 30, 2009 Full Review Source: At the Movies | Comment
At the Movies
Top Critic IconTop Critic

The staging by theater director Mark Brokaw, in his first feature, is, well, stagy. I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting.

March 30, 2009 Full Review Source: Christian Science Monitor | Comment
Christian Science Monitor
Top Critic IconTop Critic

The foils have no compunction about hurling ugly truths at each other, most of the time much too literally to work on screen.

March 27, 2009 Full Review Source: Los Angeles Times | Comment
Los Angeles Times
Top Critic IconTop Critic

The material is crying out for a satiric wit or at least a stronger point of view. Instead, it's a mishmash in which everyone gets to say his piece, but all of it has been said before.

March 27, 2009 Full Review Source: New York Post | Comment
New York Post
Top Critic IconTop Critic

Spinning Into Butter is the perfect example of a movie taking an interesting premise and, through incompetence of acting, writing and directing, turning it into an unwatchable mess.

August 30, 2009 Full Review Source: Washington Times | Comment

if you're not interested in a sermon, you'll want to skip this one

June 15, 2009 Full Review Source: 7M Pictures | Comment
7M Pictures

More spin than spinning, this raw race conversation-driven drama taps into timely issues touching on diversity conflicts that persist. But sorry to say, Spinning is no Crash, and comes off more as good intentions dissipating into irresponsible filmmaking.

June 8, 2009 Full Review Source: NewsBlaze | Comment
NewsBlaze

Butter makes a disastrous transition to film, aiming to salvage pertinent points on the witch's brew of racism through a filmmaking undertaking perhaps best described as "total clown shoes."

May 5, 2009 Full Review Source: DVDTalk.com | Comment
DVDTalk.com

Painfully earnest and unrelievedly stilted and cliched, the movie is less a drama than a well-meaning but rather ridiculous diatribe.

April 17, 2009 Full Review Source: One Guy's Opinion | Comment
One Guy's Opinion

Initially compelling, but spins into a hodgepodge of contrived scenes, uneven drama and poorly developed, yet provocative issues that simmer for too long without actually coming to a boil.

March 31, 2009 Full Review Source: NYC Movie Guru | Comment
NYC Movie Guru

Crash was a master class in subtlety compared to Spinning Into Butter.

March 27, 2009 Full Review Source: Washington City Paper | Comment
Washington City Paper

Betraying its theatrical origins, Brokaw's feature debut is a vastly disappointing message movie in which Sarah Jessica Parker (also credited as producer) is miscast, to say the least.

March 27, 2009 Full Review Source: EmanuelLevy.Com | Comment
More Critic Reviews

Audience Reviews for Spinning Into Butter

I was happy to see Brooklyn College (the college that I attended) in this film, as the college where most of the action takes place. On the positive, the acting is really good. On the negative, the film feels too much like an after school special or a Lifetime TV film of the week. I figured out right away which

January 23, 2010
SC007
Sol C

Super Reviewer

I saw this film for my Theater in Film class. While the film is undeniably well intentioned, that only goes so far for a film. It does what it sets out to do, but it doesn't do it incredibly well. Acting/Characters: In terms of characters, there is nothing here that hasn't been seen before a million times. The

March 24, 2011
Lord Naseby
Lord Naseby

Super Reviewer

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