Sightlines · reception
How First Cow was received
2020 · Kelly Reichardt · First Cow on Sightlines
The arc
Its March 2020 theatrical run was cut off almost immediately by COVID lockdowns, so most people met it at home — and it quietly snowballed from critics'-darling (New York Film Critics Circle's Best Film of 2020) into a consensus pick for the best American film of its year, now a fixture on best-of-the-decade-so-far lists.
What’s debated
The perennial split: devotees call its patience the whole point, while detractors say 'nothing happens' — sharpened by the fact that critics' groups crowned it and the Oscars gave it zero nominations.
Its footprint
Evie the cow became a genuine internet celebrity, the oily cakes launched a thousand baking attempts, and the William Blake epigraph about the bird, the spider, and friendship is quoted in seemingly every other Letterboxd review — it's become shorthand for 'gentle cinema' about male tenderness.
Where it stands
An A24-era instant canon climber and Letterboxd sweetheart — the film cinephiles hand you when you say Reichardt is an acquired taste.
Did you know? The New York Film Critics Circle named it the Best Film of 2020 — and it still walked away with zero Oscar nominations, one of the era's most-cited awards snubs.
Named by the director
- Peter Hutton — Reichardt dedicated the film to the late landscape filmmaker, her longtime Bard College colleague, and has spoken about his influence on its patient images of river and forest.