San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

It doesn’t make cows into human beings. If anything, for some 90 minutes, it turns us into a cow. In doing so, it shows us — in a way that we actually feel it — how amazing it is to exist.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture.

The A.V. Club by Mark Keizer

Its observational shooting style is simple yet rich in quotidian detail. Its storytelling is morally neutral, yet charged with moments that obligate the viewer to question our treatment of farm animals.

Los Angeles Times by Katie Walsh

What Arnold manages to make tangibly cinematic in Cow is the soulful spirituality of these animals, their beauty and their emotions. It is as moving as it is devastating, and although this film requires patience and fortitude, it rewards with a singular and perspective-shifting cinematic experience.

RogerEbert.com by Tomris Laffly

By the end of Arnold’s lyrical passion project, one feels genuinely connected to Luma and her likes, deeply concerned about their wellbeing amid the grueling circumstances they are obligated to dwell in.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

[A] wordless, moving and sometimes unsettling documentary.

The Playlist by Elena Lazic

No matter which way one looks at it — whether at cow-level or not — the lives of these animals are not happy ones. Therefore, the ethical question that remains isn’t about whether these animals are being treated well or not, but simply about what we are willing to live with.

Original-Cin by Liam Lacey

Cow never makes any case for veganism or any other cause. Rather, the film is a product of the increasing scrutiny of our destructive hierarchical categories, including the unnecessary cruelty of factory farming, the growth in the legal studies of animal rights, and scientific interest in animal consciousness.

CineVue by Christopher Machell

A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.

Variety by Guy Lodge

A filmmaker infectiously attuned to movement, Arnold finds a horrible, hypnotic rhythm in these gruelingly looped procedures, though she doesn’t shoot them with any surplus beauty.

TheWrap by Jason Solomons

The main problem, on the surface, is why would you watch it? It’s certainly not a crowd pleaser, but there is remarkable film craft on display, plenty of moments of wonder and beauty, some heart-melting tenderness and a finale to match “The Irishman.”

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

There remains something unknowable about Luma, but while that proves a limitation, Cow also turns it into a strength. We wonder what’s she thinking, and then we put ourselves in her place — and realise it’s not a great place to be.

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

Arnold plunges us straight into her subject’s point-of-view and never leaves it until the bitter end, during a final scene that’s shocking in its bluntness.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.

Time Out by Dave Calhoun

There’s nothing cloying or corny about the way Arnold depicts these beasts. What she gives us is a straightforward slice of a cow’s relentless life of muck, milk, breeding and feeding.

The Film Stage by Ed Frankl

Yet despite a lo-fi, handheld-camera cragginess, it still has something of the lyricism that marks so much of her work, going back to the Oscar-winning short Wasp.