First Cow

"Decidedly moulded from the revisionist anti-Western contours of a McCabe and Mrs. Miller, First Cow is a wonderful showcase of Reichardt’s invigoratingly clear-eyed and understated register. It’s a kind vision of a frontier dream that elegantly addresses class imbalance and the corrupting influence of colonialism and greed with wry, subtle humour and genuine empathy for its characters."

"A lyrical, beautifully performed and gently engrossing ballad of a film."

"Will strike some viewers as too little in terms of dramatic machinery. Whatever."

"A wonderfully unhurried film, which may be why it is so captivating."

"One of the best films of the year."

"Someone clean up this milk before I start crying again."

"The deliberate paces of Reichardt's storytelling do cast a sort of spell: a bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life."

"Both tranquil and dazzling..."

"Just don't mistake the lightness of step for a softness of philosophy."

"Perfectly made, perfectly acted and ultimately moving - a melancholy memory in miniature, a Daguerreotype of a distant time that may be more like our own than we know."

"King-Lu and Cookie need each other...and First Cow commiserates with their journey in a kind-hearted fashion that allows the movie to resonate with more warmth than it initially lets on."

"While not a lot happens in First Cow by the standards of most two-hour narrative films, and some may wish for a less open-ended conclusion, the drama's rough-edged lyricism kept me rapt the entire time."

"Reichardt specialises in pared-down narratives, sometimes stripping away so much that boredom sets in. "First Cow" may be lean, but it offers ample room to ruminate in the comparison between its two time periods."

"The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it's unfortunate that John Magaro and Orion Lee's characters ultimately feel outside it all."