First Cow — IQ Score 161/200

Kelly Reichardt's 2019 Oregon-Territory frontier film set in the 1820s anchored by a friendship between a cook and a Chinese immigrant who steal milk from a settler's prized dairy cow. The structural commitment to letting period-frontier-economic specificity (the milk-and-honey-cake commerce, the trading-post hierarchies) be the actual subject — at a deliberate slow-pace register most American cinema refuses — established the film as the catalog's most-canonical late-career entry.