After “American Honey” won the Jury Prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, Andrea Arnold launched from a director of note to one of England’s premiere cinematic talents. Since then, however, Arnold’s taken a pivot to the small screen. She directed the entire second season of HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and also did a bunch of episodes for Amazon Prime’s “Transparent” and Netflix’s “I Love Dick.”

READ MORE: The 20 Best Films Of 2022 We’ve Already Seen

Now, audiences finally get to see Arnold’s cinematic return that premiered at Cannes last summer.

Continue reading ‘Cow’ Trailer: Andrea Arnold’s Empathetic Bovie Doc Debuts On April 8 at The Playlist.

The new year has come, which means awards season speculation and Best-Of lists run rampant before the cycle begins all over again, albeit a little belatedly this year (we needed a break!) Sundance starts next week, the Festival moving online/virtual again this year with the surge in post-holiday Omicron cases. In some ways, the Oscar game often kicks off in Park City, unofficially, critically acclaimed titles like “Coda,” often first making their mark on a potential awards run.

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As we pointed out in our Best Documentaries of 2021 list, this year we saw quite a few filmmakers really play with the non-fiction film form in unique, often impactful ways. And it would appear that 2022 is keeping that trend alive with the release of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow.”

READ MORE: ‘Cow’: Andrea Arnold Delivers A Simple, But Empathic Look At The Lives & Suffering Of Bovines [Cannes Review]

Instead of being a macro view of factory farming when it comes to cows, Arnold’s documentary is a heartbreakingly micro view of the situation, focusing on the story of one cow and the life she leads on a farm.

Continue reading ‘Cow’ Trailer: Andrea Arnold’s Cannes Doc Finally Hits UK Theaters & MUBI In Early 2022 at The Playlist.

Andrea Arnold is aware that cows roaming the countryside is an image cut straight from the cloth of pastoral English iconography, the stuff of Victorian novels and Renaissance paintings. “[For] a lot of our modern lives, our sort of view of nature is a very romantic one,” she says. “It’s a very sort of postural, are we going to have a picnic and a nice bit of nature? We engage with the romance of it as opposed to the reality of it.” 

READ MORE: Best Of Cannes 2021: 15 Must-See Movies From The Festival

The reality of nature, in all its unglamorized truth, is the driving force of Arnold’s new film, “Cow,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Continue reading Filmmaker Andrea Arnold On ‘Cow’: The Beauty & Brutality Of Nature In All Is Unglamorized Truth [Interview] at The Playlist.

Well, that’s a wrap on the 2021 Cannes Film Festival; 56 reviews and counting (there might be one or two more stragglers to come, but we are basically done). It was a pretty great festival and strong year despite the COVID-19 protocol confusion, those changing rules, and Spike Lee spoiling the Palme d’Or prize early (Spike!!).

READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival 2021 Preview: 25 Films To Watch

2021 was a strong year, and perhaps that’s not a surprise since films like Wes Anderson‘s “The French Dispatch,” Paul Verhoven‘s “Benedetta,” and other movies basically waited an entire year waiting for the global pandemic to subside so they could premiere under optimal conditions.

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The fact that cows in dairy farms usually tend to have miserable lives should be a surprise to no one in this day and age. This knowledge, however, does not take away any of the power of Andrea Arnold’s “Cow,” playing in the Cannes Premiere section of this year’s Festival de Cannes. Five years after premiering “American Honey” in Competition, the director is back on the Croisette with a seemingly simple film that, in fact, brings up interesting and difficult questions regarding the limits between anthropomorphism on-screen and animal rights — or the lack thereof.

Continue reading ‘Cow’: Andrea Arnold Delivers A Simple, But Empathic Look At The Lives & Suffering Of Bovines [Cannes Review] at The Playlist.

It’s that time of year again, though a little delayed. Following the cancellation of the 2020 Cannes Film Festival last year, thanks to the global pandemic, Cannes is triumphantly back this year with a whopper of a line-up, And it’s one that’s perhaps overflowing with things that were due to appear at the festival last year (Wes Anderson‘s “The French Dispatch,” Paul Verhoeven’s “Benedetta”) and instead were held for an entire year by the filmmakers and producers.

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Every year is a good year to stan female directors, but 2021 has cooked us up a real feast. Acting veterans like Rebecca Hall, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, and Halle Berry are finally claiming their director’s chairs on feature films, while arthouse icon Jane Campion is returning to hers after 12 years. Foreign language directors like Lucile Hadžihalilović and Ildikó Enyedi are making their English-language debuts, and French juggernaut Mélanie Laurent is working on two releases back to back.

Continue reading 52 Films Directed By Women To Watch In 2021 at The Playlist.