Spinning Into Butter

Though the movie trails off unsatisfyingly, it raises intriguing and candid, if unanswerable, questions about race relations and political correctness.

Despite the film's haphazard choices and aversion to subtlety, Parker and Williamson come off as appealing sparring partners.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.

Less a movie than an essay.

What seemed sharp and pointed onstage comes across pedantically in the film, which treats its subject with a clumsy heavy-handedness.

If freshman film students were assigned to make a movie on race relations, this contrived attempt is probably what they'd come up with.