2020 Releases Ranked-HERE

First Cow is a 2019 American drama film directed by Kelly Reichardt and starring John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, Ewen Bremner, Scott Shephard, Gary Farmer and Lily Gladstone. The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2019, but didn’t receive a worldwide release until July 2020, therefore I’ve included it in my 2020 ranking.  

Right out of the gate I’m going to say I was expecting more cow 🐮! I really was and that disappointed me as I really just wanted to see a cow on screen for 2 hours as ultimately that might have been more interesting. We need a cow cut of this film! 

I get what Kelly Reichardt was going for, an interesting slow burning film that’s both beautiful to watch and interesting to the audience but for me, whilst this film was beautiful to watch with its great cinematography and cute cow, it wasn’t at all interesting to me for the majority of the runtime. Some of the story can be entertaining but the slow burn of the film really didn’t work. I normally love slow films like “A Quiet Place” and “Arrival” but this one just didn’t work for me as I feel it was slightly too long as 25 minutes could have easily been cut to make it more watchable. 

What I will say though is that this film has beautiful cinematography and two good performances in John Magaro and Orion Lee and this really did help push up the rating for this film. However, the storyline just wasn’t interesting to me for the majority of the runtime, there are some good points throughout the film and the scene in the house with Toby Jones was actually really good compared to the first hour which was incredibly slow and uninteresting.

In all honest, I do think the first half of this film is dreadfully slow, uninteresting and genuinely had me wanting to switch it off. However, as the hour mark passed and the story because a bit more interesting, the characters started to grow on me a bit more and the pace, whilst still slow, seemed a tad bit better given the escalation of the storyline. 

Overall, I really did like some parts of First Cow, the beautiful scenery intoxicated me and the acting from the two leads were good but sadly the pace let the film down for me and the storyline, while it was told good, didn’t exactly interest me as much as I would have liked. Maybe it’s just the day I’ve had or maybe it’s just that I didn’t like the film as much as many people but this disappointed me more than it pleased me. By no means is it a bad film, it’s a good film. Just not the masterpiece people are saying it is, but I will say the parallel from the opening and the ending scenes was fantastic to see. I wanted more cow!

What’s your favourite A24 film? 

3/5