The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Terry Gilliam, 2009

I suspect Francis Ford Coppola is a bovophobe. Although I estimate that cattle appear in about a third of all movies, there's not a cow to be seen in the entirety of the Godfather trilogy, I don't think there are any in The Conversation, and then in Apocalypse Now there's that cruelly drawn-out scene of the cow being slaughtered. And they did it for real.

Of course, there's a sick irony in ever having happy cows on screen at all, given that movies are shot on film made with gelatin from the boiled bones of animals including cows.

But anyway, as with Apocalypse Now, there are only dead cows in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. They are banged into by a gondola as they float lifeless in a river.