The result is heartwrenching.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2024

In her first documentary feature Cow, Andrea Arnold concocts a deeply profound and strikingly resonant film about a mother’s forced separation from her child.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 18, 2024

Cow opens up the dialogue about the on-screen role of animals beyond the call for activism. In it, the protagonists dictate the camera movements and positions just as any other human subject would.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 29, 2023

Arnold’s assembly stops short of making any condemnation of the human masters who guide Luma through her paces, but Cow surely raises age-old questions about the relationship between people and “their” animals.

| May 9, 2023

The British auteur Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) turns to documentary with this powerful, cow’s eye view of the dairy industry. You may never look a pint of milk in the face again.

| Dec 27, 2022

There’s nothing pastoral about Cow...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 16, 2022

Cow would provide an intriguing choice for library education programs about animal welfare. Film professors might also find it useful as an example of cinéma vérité or observational cinema.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 26, 2022

Andrea Arnold toes the line between documentary, quotidian drama, and intimate cinema to make room for something gutsy and unique. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2022

Arnold's camera works like a sponge. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 8, 2022

The quiet moments amplify a cinematic gravity that's aided by such inviting cinematography.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 8, 2022

A rigorous exercise of subjectivity, Arnold humanizes this cow with no future... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 19, 2022

Its lyricism comes from the stark visuals and sound design, the hypnotic rhythm, and the camera’s intimacy.

| May 5, 2022

Cow is not always an easy documentary to watch, because it shows the often-harsh realities of being a cow on a farm. The starkness of this reality is fascinating because it can be heartwarming in some ways and disturbing in other ways.

| May 1, 2022

A film which tells the story of dairy cows through the lens of one dairy cow. Luna tells her own story. Luna is a cow. How? How you ask? Because Andrea Arnold does not get humans to tell the story of Lunas life. She does it herself.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 1, 2022

It's not a PETA video, appealing to your emotional vulnerability, or trying to convert you to a cause you might well not believe in. It is instead a work of profound empathy.

| Original Score: 90/100 | Apr 29, 2022

For 90+ minutes I was enthralled by Andrea Arnold's meditative and ultimately profound work, Cow, the most compelling documentary in years...What Arnold asks of the viewer is a kind of bovine empathy...The ending is like a wrecking ball to the soul.

| Original Score: A- | Apr 28, 2022

Andrea Arnold delicately captures the boring, beautiful life of a dairy cow.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 27, 2022

Cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk shoots the film less like a nature documentary than an intense psychological thriller.

| Apr 24, 2022

I think it's supposed to make you feel for the cow, but I don't get the sense that it's leading a terrible life.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 15, 2022

Whatever emotions a viewer takes away from Cow will be, I suspect, the emotions they bring to the experience, since Arnold isn’t showing her cards.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 14, 2022