We know what you're thinking: "Sure, Huang Bo might be China's hottest superstar, but he can't possibly act opposite livestock!" Well, jump back, haters - here comes COW, the Mainland Chinese blockbuster featuring the coolest wall-smashing slab of beef since Takashi Miike's Gozu.

Niu Er (Huang Bo) is a slob with a face only a farm animal could love. He's a country bumpkin assigned to be the reluctant caretaker for his village's "foreign cow," a fancy-pants steer of unknown origin dumped on them by the retreating Chinese Army. But when the Sino-Japanese War comes crashing through their village, Niu Er finds himself alone in a battle-scarred wasteland with no one by his side but that darn cow, now named after his lost love. With winter growing colder, Niu Er and "Jiu" close ranks to fight off the Japanese as well as former neighbors turned enemies in a ghost town teeming with land mines and hidden dangers. As the bombs fall and the bayonets clash, and the movie shuttles between past and present, Jiu and Niu drift through the crossfire, finding something divine in an impossible friendship that transcends this sad, scared world.

Cow took ten million in its opening weekend and a wagon-load of Golden Horse Awards in its mammoth jaws, including "Best Actor" for Huang Bo, whose lead performance is a tragicomic high-wire act, perfectly embodying the film's cartoon action and its bleak humanity in a world where human life is as disposable as an animal's. The film's true stars, however, are its multiple cows in the title role, each possessing amazing expressiveness and droll comic timing no scriptwriter could invent. Painted by director Guan Hu in scenes of gorgeous desolation, Cow makes you laugh from the belly then shivs you in the gut, illuminating the horrors of war while maintaining a steely grace. Its interspecies antiwar message is simple: when times are tough, the cow is your co-pilot. Love her.