First Cow

Director: Kelly Reichardt

2019 / 122min / DCP

Tight-lipped cook John Magaro joins with a party of Oregon Territory fur trappers while heading west, then finds friendship—and a lucrative business partnership—with entrepreneurial Chinese immigrant Orion Lee in Reichardt’s patiently observed evocation of life on the 19th-century American frontier, based on Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half-Life. A warm, delicate, meticulous portrait of platonic male friendship and lives of hardscrabble scarcity that also functions as a low-key thriller, depicting an unforgiving world in which one false move can have irrevocable consequences. “One of the best movies of the year.”—The Atlantic

Q&A with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, moderated by filmmaker Sara Driver, on Friday, May 24th

Part of American Landscapes: The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt