These plans include expanding the base of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in southern India and reaching out to sections within the Muslim community not aligned with the PFI.

The Sangh believes that the student wing of PFI, the Campus Front of India (CFI), was instrumental in galvanising minority students on the hijab controversy in Karnataka and was successful in making it a national issue.

The Karnataka HC recently ruled that hijab is not an essential practice in Islam and so if a school does not allow it, students can’t insist on wearing the hijab. Students have challenged the order in the Supreme Court now.

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“The PFI, which used to be limited to Kerala once, is fast spreading its wings. It is in campuses everywhere in the South and has now begun making forays in the North too. During the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in UP, they played an important role. There is a need to counter their growing influence,” a senior RSS leader told The Indian Express.

What has rattled the Sangh the most is that the PFI’s organisational structure and functioning is quite similar to the RSS. “They have socio-cultural outreach, they are in campuses and even have a wing which conducts parades and marches just like the Sangh does. They have shown that they are here for a long haul,” another leader said.

According to sources, the Sangh plans to embark on a public outreach programme across the country to expose PFI and tell the truth on “misinformation spread by the outfit”.  This would be coupled with outreach to sections within the minority community.

“Not all Muslims are aligned with PFI ideology. A large number of them do not like its militant activism. We have to reach out to them,” an RSS functionary said.

Apart from this, the Sangh plans to expand further in campuses in south India. “We already have a very good network in Karnataka. Even in Telangana, we are doing very well. In Kerala we are fighting but the Left continues to dominate campuses. In Andhra, we have work to do in the coastal areas. In Tamil Nadu too we have to increase our influence,” a leader said.

ABVP currently has 33,44,917 members.

Many in the RSS believe that the government must ban PFI, given many reports by agencies against the outfit. “We are not the government,  which may have its own compulsions of law and process. But working with society is our realm,” another functionary said.

In its annual report tabled during the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha baithak in Gujarat recently, the RSS said there was “growing religious fanaticism” in the country in the guise of “Constitution and religious freedom” and “elaborate plans by a particular community to enter the government machinery”.

It also called for “all-out efforts with organized strength” to “defeat this menace”.

Suggesting it to be a conspiracy with long-term goals, the report said: “There appear to be elaborate plans by a particular community to enter the government machinery. Behind all this, it seems that a deep conspiracy with a long-term goal is working. On the strength of numbers, preparations are being made to adopt any route to get their demands accepted.”

Lamenting that many battles fought by Indian kings against invaders have been forgotten, Shah said that those battles, such as the ones waged by Ahom kings in Assam and Chhatrapati Shivaji-led Marathas, ensured that India reached where it has now.

Shah said that now, no one can stop the process of writing about these battles for the next generation. “It’s a fact that some have distorted history. They have written whatever they had to. But who can stop us…nobody can stop us. History is not created by governments but built on true events,” the senior BJP leader said while releasing the book, “Maharanas: A Thousand Year War for Dharma”, authored by Omendra Ratnu, an ENT surgeon from Jaipur.

According to Shah, efforts to  bring out facts through new history books should be “bigger and more intense than those that spread lies” so that they “can be effective”.

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The RSS and BJP have always maintained that history books in India were crafted by Left-oriented authors who, according to them, ignored the contributions of Hindu kings and kingdoms.

Shah had earlier urged filmmakers to focus on unsung heroes. In April, he was present at an event to mark the screening of “Vidrohi”, a TV serial based on the life of Odia freedom fighter Buxi Jagabandhu. Last week, he attended a special screening of Samrat Prithviraj, a movie on Prithviraj Chauhan.

On Friday, Shah warned that while books like “Maharanas”, which is about “the resistance of Mewar kings for 1,000 uninterrupted years to Islamic invaders”, will trigger debates through which youngsters will know about India’s “glorious past”, it will take a long time for them to get established.

“If we begin researching and writing history, it will start debates, and the younger generation will start discussions. But it’s a long journey… Many significant events got forgotten as the dust of time has fallen on them. We have to unearth them and bring them before the people to awaken society,” he said.

Shah urged authors to write on dynasties like Pandyas, Ahoms, Chalukyas, Mauryas, Guptas, etc, because those who wrote history “overlooked” and “did not bother” to write about them.

“There are no reference books, either. I want to say, one should give up making comments on it but write on them to bring out the real history before people. This will gradually make the history, which we consider as false, disappear on its own,” he said, adding that a number of authors are working in this direction now.

दिल्ली में ‘महाराणा: सहस्र वर्षों का धर्मयुद्ध’ पुस्तक के विमोचन कार्यक्रम को संबोधित करते हुए। https://t.co/QrEC8a0qDk

— Amit Shah (@AmitShah) June 10, 2022

Shah said that although the Government has started initiatives to document “actual history”, the exercise will be successful only when society takes it up as a mission.

“Had Veer Savarkar not been there, I can tell you, the truth about 1857 would not have come out… revolutions, which might have been defeated at that time, have the potential to awaken the society and the people. Padmavati’s sacrifice had given energy to women and men to live their lives, keeping their heads high… Documenting history is important because the outcome of events or revolts is immaterial…it should be weighed on the impact it has on people,” he said.

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“The invaders finished the language, culture and traditions of the regions they attacked, but they had to stop here in India… I can say with pride that whoever had fought for India and sacrificed for India would be resting in peace now because we are making them proud after so many years,” he said.

They’re really doing it

Video game adaptations continue to be all the rage, and now Duke Nukem gets to join in. The movie rights to Duke Nukem have been acquired by Legendary Entertainment.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Legendary has quite an interesting crew on board to produce the Duke Nukem project, too. Cobra Kai creators Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Hayden Schlossberg are reportedly on board.

Alongside Legendary Entertainment, Marla Studios will also be on to produce. Marla Studios was founded by Assassin’s Creed (the movie) producer Jean-Julien Baronnet and specializes in video game adaptations. THR reports the search for a writer is underway, and there’s no director attached just yet either.

There was a Duke Nukem film project in the works not too long ago, over at paramount. The project even had wrestling superstar John Cena attached to it, but the film reportedly stalled out.

The Duke is back?

By all accounts, this is some wild news. Duke Nukem may have been a heavy-hitter of the arena shooter era, but the series has stalled out. The infamously catastrophic Duke Nukem Forever seemed like it had forever shut the lid on new Duke Nukem games.

But not all video game heroes of the ’90s have faded into obscurity. Lara Croft had her revival in both video game and movie form, and Serious Sam has kept trucking along. 2016’s Doom was a brilliant revitalization, but it also made Doomguy a household name again.

Does Duke Nukem still have that appeal? Either way, Legendary Entertainment is picking the right team. The Cobra Kai is pretty dang good, and I’d imagine those showrunners could do something interesting with Duke. To be honest, after re-visiting the old Cena news, I’m now picturing a Peacemaker-style take on Duke Nukem and thinking it could somehow work.

The CEO of Sony Pictures has referred to Uncharted as a ‘franchise’, suggesting a sequel is on the way.

According to Deadline, Tom Rothman sent a companywide email following the film’s US box office success this weekend, praising staff for its performance.

“With over $100 million in box office worldwide in just one weekend, and a 90% positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Uncharted is a new hit movie franchise for the company”, Rothman said.

“This marks a great victory for every single division of the company, as the film was our first major production entirely shut down by the advent of Covid, yet we persevered to complete a picture the audience loves and marketed and distributed it with strategic verve worldwide, despite the pandemic.”

Rothman added: “I want to thank all of the filmmakers, the wonderful cast and crew, and especially our friends at PlayStation Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment for their support. And of course, I want to thank each and every one of you for your creativity, dedication and belief.”

The use of the term ‘franchise’, which is generally used to describe a series rather than a standalone film, suggests there are already plans to make a second Uncharted movie.

A post-credits scene at the end of Uncharted also teases a potential sequel, and director Ruben Fleischer told Entertainment Weekly (warning: its article spoils the scene) that it was designed to “let audiences know that this, hopefully, wouldn’t be the last of them hearing of [Drake and Sully]”.

The Uncharted movie, which had a $120 budget, launched in 15 markets on February 11 and made a solid start internationally. It has earned $139 million worldwide to date.

The it then hit US theatres on February 18 and reportedly recorded the fourth biggest opening weekend for a video game adaptation at the US box office, generating $44 million in its first three days to top the weekly sales chart.

Only 2001’s Tomb Raider ($47m), 2019’s Detective Pikachu ($54m) and 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog ($58m) have enjoyed stronger US openings.

His voice is a little deeper, there are a few creases around the eyes, but Tom Cruise is as we remember him.  At 59, Cruise has been one of the few constants in the ever-changing film business. 

He has yet to play a superhero. He’s resisted the siren call of television. 

“I make movies for the big screen,” he recently told the crowd at Cannes Film Festival where he presented Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the 1986 air combat film from director Tony Scott. 

There was a time Cruise was shaking things up. He was the slippery sex guru of Magnolia. The bellowing studio exec of Tropic Thunder. Even director Stanley Kubrick found a complexity to Cruise’s Ken doll charisma in the steamy Eyes Wide Shut. 

For the last decade, Cruise has been laser-focused on a singular kind of character: The Best. Whether it’s space ranger, fighter pilot, or covert agent, Cruise plays the optimal human. The bravest. The most determined. The only flaws are coming from those who stand in his way.

Which brings us to Cruise’s return as Capt. Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell. As Admiral Bates breathlessly intones in the new film, “his exploits are legendary.” 

Known by his call sign, Maverick is one of the most experienced combat pilots in the navy. Set 30 years after the original, the film opens with Maverick working as a test pilot. As Cruise pushes the experimental jet past Mach 10, hammering the dashboard with his patented “Come On!” a flinty-eyed rear admiral (Ed Harris) orders him to land. 

He does not. 

But before the admiral can clip his wings, there are new orders: report to Top Gun training school. 

If the cycle of derring-do with a dash of insubordination sounds familiar, buckle up, because Top Gun: Maverick is a heat-seeking missile of movie memories, weaponizing every frame of the original film for maximum impact. 

Just as with the original, Top Gun: Maverick opens with a montage of ear-splitting takeoffs, fiery afterburners all accompanied by the Kenny Loggins classic song Danger Zone. America’s war machine has never looked better.

But that’s just the warm-up. 

As he prepares to return to Top Gun academy, Cruise pulls The Jacket out of his locker. He puts on the mirrored sunglasses and jumps on his Kawasaki motorcycle. Director Joseph Kosinski films Maverick’s return to the flight school with all the majesty of a knight in shining armour mounting his steed.

As Cruise zooms past the tarmac, little does he know this is a different kind of mission. No longer a competitor, he’s now the teacher — and he’ll be training a new generation of elite fighter pilots to take out a dangerous uranium enrichment facility. The country of this rogue state is never mentioned. To maximize profitability and avoid any potential offence, the politics of the film have been completely neutered to the point where even Cruise’s famous flight jacket had Japanese and Taiwanese flags removed to avoid upsetting China. 

Top Gun: Maverick is not a subtle film. This is a story where each young pilot comes with a call sign and their own baggage, repeated multiple times for maximum clarity. Glen Powell plays Hangman, a pilot with a carnivorous smile who only looks out for himself.  Then there’s the Rooster, played by the mustachioed Miles Teller, who doesn’t know when to take the shot. 

Rooster is much more than a pilot fighting his instincts, he’s the frustrated son of Goose — who died when Maverick’s jet spun out of control 30 years ago. With Teller’s height and long face, he easily could be the son of actor Anthony Edwards who played his fictional father in the original.

Militarily, Maverick’s biggest challenge is getting the students ready for a seemingly impossible mission in three weeks. But what he’s really battling are the ghosts of the past, wrestling with the death of his friend and the responsibility of putting Goose’s son in danger. 

It’s difficult to critique how heavy-handed the storytelling is because the film is so naked in its intentions. This smart bomb of nostalgia repurposes every element from the original, from the sweaty beach sports sequence to the synth pop pumping in the background. Even Val Kilmer, who lost his voice to throat cancer, was recruited and returns as Iceman, now promoted and acting as Maverick’s guardian angel. While Kilmer’s role is mainly silent, his star presence is enough that his brief appearance is effective.

What Top Gun: Maverick lacks in subtlety it makes up for with stunning cinematography and flight sequences with actors in the centre of the action. Cruise is an experienced pilot who is known for pushing his cast and crew. Not only did he design a five-month flight training course for the young actors, but he reportedly insisted on the camera system being placed in the cockpits to capture the flight manoeuvres. The result is a blend of acting and real aerial footage that is breathtaking.

We’re so accustomed to watching computer-generated effects that it takes a moment to process that those are real canyons and clouds whipping past the actors as the world swings around them like a gyroscope. 

But there’s one special effect Cruise can’t replicate: his younger self’s vulnerability.  Yes, the Tom Cruise of 1986 was a bit of a babyface who looked like he should barely be driving, never mind flying $30-million fighter jets. But there was a spark of danger there. Pete had something to prove. He earned that call sign Maverick. Even Iceman didn’t trust him. He was too hungry, too reckless. 

In the sequel, nothing is left to chance. The camera orbits around him, his skills are unquestioned. Even Jennifer Connelly as the old flame Penny inevitably gives in with a love scene that has all the passion of a Christmas card. But this too makes sense. There is an almost saintly air about the characters Cruise plays now. He’s gone beyond the needs of the flesh. Call it the Church of Tom. 

Top Gun: Maverick ends with a stunning 30-minute climax filled with roaring jets and close calls. His face hidden behind the oxygen mask, all we have are Cruise’s eyes and voice. The jet has become a projection of his will. 

“Don’t think, just do,” he tells Rooster as they zip over the terrain. 

The actor has spent the past 10 years showing us he’s the best at everything. He’s clearly convinced himself and the people he works with. But in his mania to control every element, he’s lost a little of the spark that made him so watchable in the first place. 

Top Gun: Maverick opens in theatres May 27th

It’s been nearly a year since production on HBO’s big-budget adaptation of The Last of Us descended on Alberta, shutting down major roads and flyovers and drawing leagues of curious fans to peer at the production from afar, sometimes with binoculars.

Albertans will have to wait until some time in 2023 to see the fruits of that labour on screen, but production on the first season is drawing to a close this week. The final day of shooting is scheduled for Friday.

“I think it’s been an amazing year for film and television in this province,” said Calgary Economic Development’s film commissioner, Luke Azevedo. “That particular series had a lot to do with the growth and development of film and television this past year.”

The show, which stars Pedro Pascal of The Mandalorian and Bella Ramsey of Game of Thrones as Joel and Ellie, respectively, is based on the hit video game of the same name.

The show is set in a post-apocalyptic world 20 years after modern civilization has been destroyed. In the video game series, Joel and Ellie seek to survive as they are pursued by mutated humans infected by a parasitic fungus.

WATCH | Late last year, production on The Last of Us turned the Fourth Avenue flyover into a post-apocalyptic movie set:

A TV production based on the video game The Last of Us, recently turned the Fourth Avenue flyover into a post-apocalyptic movie set. It drew a crowd of curious onlookers, trying to catch a glimpse of the show’s stars and a zombie or two.

The production’s budget for the first season hasn’t been officially disclosed by HBO (and the network did not respond to requests for comment), but Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has said the series is the largest in Canadian history. 

It is expected to represent more than $200 million in revenue for Alberta.

The series spent time filming at Mount Royal University and at SAIT and headed north to Edmonton, where the production covered the Alberta Legislature Building in vines.

It also shot in smaller communities around Calgary such as Okotoks, High River and Fort Macleod, which was also featured prominently in the latest Ghostbusters film.

Calgary resident Mark Innes, who resides in Sunnyside, says most of the sets for the production have been within a 10-minute bike ride from his house — so he frequently took to cycling down with a camera to document the production.

“I visited some other sets and was just really impressed with the craftsmanship. And the way that the city was transformed to be Boston or Pittsburgh,” he said.

“It just creates some excitement in the city. We’ve been lacking for [that] since oil and gas crashed. So something like this, I think it brings added excitement to the area.”

Azevedo said the size of the production signals that Alberta has infrastructure in place to suit similar film and television projects.

“It has had an impact on the entire province — hotels have felt it, restaurants have felt it, car rental facilities have felt it, infrastructure like studios and sound stages have felt it,” he said.

“A project of this size, enabling all of our sector to be able to support it, was an amazing, amazing experience.”

The original The Last of Us video game has sold more than 20 million copies as of October 2019, and is one of the highest-selling PlayStation video games of all time.

Boom in location production

The project has coincided with a number of other big-budget productions filming around the province in recent months, including Under the Banner of Heaven, Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock and Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

That’s led to some memorable moments in recent weeks on the press junket from the actors starring in those productions, such as Under the Banner of Heaven star Andrew Garfield fondly reminiscing about his time spent at the Repsol Sports Centre (recently rebranded as the MNP Community and Sport Centre).

“It has a great steam room,” Garfield told Entertainment Tonight Canada. “Big ups to the Repsol Centre.”

“I loved it. I genuinely loved a href=”https://twitter.com/cityofcalgary?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”@cityofcalgary/a and I loved a href=”https://twitter.com/TravelAlberta?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”@TravelAlberta/a. I love the people. I love the restaurants. I love the food. I loved the nature as you said – a href=”https://twitter.com/banfflakelouise?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”@banfflakelouise/a” – actor Andrew Garfield on his time in the province shooting “Under the Banner of Heaven” a href=”https://t.co/zhcqLdKsun”pic.twitter.com/zhcqLdKsun/a

mdash;@KeepABRolling

In March 2021, the province removed its $10 million per-project tax credit cap — something that Calgary Film Centre business development manager Erin O’Connor previously told CBC News had been an effective move.

The province has said its goal is to grow the film sector by $1.5 billion over the next decade.

“The Batman” isn’t trying to connect to everything DC has done at the movies since it formed the Justice League (who are still around — just don’t expect a get-together anytime soon). And the film is better for it. You won’t see star Robert Pattinson showing up in November’s multiverse tale “The Flash,” which stars both the O.G. Batman, Keaton, and the last actor to wear the cowl, Ben Affleck. And that’s how it should be.

Mogwai have shared their beautiful new song ‘Boltfor’.

The band’s 2021 album ‘As The Love Continues’ swept to the pinnacle of the charts, and rightfully took its place in our End Of Year countdown.

Mogwai will play London’s Alexandra Palace on May 27th, and to celebrate the Glasgow group have shared something new.

A song that revels in space and control, ‘Boltfor’ was kicked off during those recent album sessions, before being finished at the band’s own Castle Of Doom space.

‘Boltfor’ is a spacious return, one that resolves into a grinding rhythm that suggests broad vistas and open landscapes.

Director Sam Wiehl picks up on this, constructing a “metaphysical road movie” in response.

He comments…

“The video is a visual metaphor for the constant movement in life and the unceasing urge to move forward as individuals… in the form of a metaphysical road movie.”

Tune in now.

Photo Credit: Antony Crook

– – –

The poignant and heartfelt documentary “Cow,” directed by Andrea Arnold, is a displaced movie. For all its virtues, its most interesting action isn’t onscreen but only hinted at. This lacuna reflects a widespread documentary practice that’s also a conventional lapse in aesthetic judgment. Arnold and her crew followed a single dairy cow named Luma, at a cattle farm in Park Farm, in Kent, England, for an intermittent four-year period. The film (which opens today in theatres and is streaming on many services) observes her through the cycle of life, from calving and giving milk through the travails of old age, amid the structured workdays on the farm. Employees guide Luma and the many other cows to the stalls where they’re connected to electrical milking machines, into fields where they romp, into pens where they feed, into other pens where Luma is mated with a bull and becomes pregnant again. But the filmmakers are absent.

“Cow” filters out the basic personal element. It doesn’t show the crew’s interactions with the farm workers, who seemingly pretend that the crew and equipment aren’t there; the efforts of the crew to stay close to Luma; or the conspicuous intrusion of Arnold and her colleagues setting up shop, with their equipment, at the farm and in the nearby fields where the animals graze. For that matter, the film also excludes the backstory on which it inevitably depends: the negotiations by Arnold and the producer, Kat Mansoor, with the farm’s management that set the terms for filming there, the implicitly transactional basis for the film’s very existence. These omissions are not a new issue with documentary filmmaking; the self-erasure comes up often (as in the Oscar-nominated “Honeyland,” in 2019) and seems baked into other agrarian films such as “Gunda” and “The Four Times,” as if both implying and concealing the incongruity of filmmakers’ presence in natural and rustic settings.

In “Cow,” the drama is thin and the ideas are distant. Closeups of Luma are the film’s emotional engine. (The cinematographer is Magda Kowalczyk.) These images have a soulfulness that’s then, at times, amplified into majesty by compositions in which sky, terrain, and other animals fill the frame with a sense of united, grand-scale, wide-ranging power. They’re the exception—and they merely punctuate the film’s sense of observational, reportorial information delivery. It’s all the more reason why the movie, despite the ambling pace, resembles the narrow train of a Hollywood fictional narrative.

The paradox of “Cow” is the paradox of modern documentary filmmaking, an aesthetic revolution that was born—in the United States and in France—on the basis of technological innovation, the ability to film while recording synchronized sound with lightweight and portable equipment. In 1960, Robert Drew produced “Primary,” in which he was able to dispatch a crew to Wisconsin to embed with the campaigns of Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey as they competed for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Around the same time in France, the filmmaker Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin collaborated on “Chronicle of a Summer,” in which they and their associates stopped people in the street to ask about their lives, and then probed further to explore the connections of work, private life, and politics—and to examine their own filmmaking process.

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Morin coined the term “cinéma vérité” for their project; Drew eventually borrowed the term for his work (he also used “candid drama” and “reality filmmaking”). Unlike Rouch and Morin, Drew (whose movies included “The Chair,” “The Children Were Watching,” and “Crisis”) didn’t feature the filmmakers discussing their work on camera or overtly interacting with their subjects. Nonetheless, Drew centered on the filmmakers’ presence, not their absence; for him, filmmaking was a unified field in which he and his crew were inevitably participants in the events that they recorded. That participation is revealed most often in the behavior of the subjects, who, far from going about their business as normal, speak to the filmmakers, address the camera, perform for it, and acknowledge its presence and its power. Drew’s candid dramas are based in the subjects’ realities—starting with the very fact of being filmed—and the emotional and intellectual authority of his work is rooted in these self-conscious performances.

All great ideas are subject to corruption; all original artistic practices risk being reduced to formulas. Much documentary filmmaking practice has devolved to the so-called observational or fly-on-the-wall method, where filmmakers get permission to embed themselves in a setting that interests them and collect recordings with the authenticity of the real—while excluding the reality of the filming. They shape their material as the fiction of what it would have been had the filmmakers not been present. At its best, this very idea resounds with a kind of directorial chutzpah—it’s what Frederick Wiseman has been doing since the beginning of his career, and the audacity comes from what he does with his disappearing act, creating scenes of immense length and complexity, in which his participants seem to be performing not for his sake but for their own, as an essential aspect of their identity and social lives. His narratives have vast arcs allowing for vast digressions because his principal subject is the abstract frameworks of institutions. He does the analytical work that seemingly builds out under the action as it advances.

Few documentary filmmakers have followed Wiseman into the radical potential of self-elision from onscreen events. Far more often, the arm’s-length observation is a sedimented convention, an unconsidered assumption about the very definition of documentary filmmaking—a choice, and a bad one, that is taken for essential and natural. The past decade-plus has been a time of grand renewal in documentary filmmaking; the very notion of creative nonfiction has been developed and expanded, as in the work of such filmmakers as Robert Greene, Penny Lane, Khalik Allah, Nanfu Wang, Theo Anthony, Courtney Stephens, and Pacho Velez, among many others. At the same time, new technology has made its power felt, often negatively. Digital video cameras, which dispense with the high cost of shooting film and make it possible to record enormous amounts of material, invite a snippety editing process that squeezes as much material as possible into a film’s standard duration.

It would be absurd to even suggest a moratorium on the observational method, but it’s no less absurd to consider it uncritically—and the most vital criticism that the practice needs is that of filmmakers themselves, in action. “Cow” reflects an admirable and fascinating motive: to enter into the daily experience and the inner life of a farm animal. Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally. The strongest moments of “Cow” evoke her fervent and empathetic dramatic sensibility but not a strong awareness of the possibilities of documentary form. In this, she’s far from alone; more than any one filmmaker’s omissions, “Cow” reflects the unquestioned conventions of the time.