What to watch (and listen to) this weekend

Cows and the end of the world

There are a lot of great movies out this week — I rounded them up here — but here is one I really want to bring to your attention: Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow.

I did a Q&A with Kelly that’s playing at the end of “virtual theatrical” releases of the film this week, which you can get through various cinemas (I’ll just link to one since it’s my hometown theater: Film at Lincoln Center). If you rent through them, you’ll support the theater and you’ll also get our chat.

Otherwise you can also get it on digital platforms like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, and some on-demand platforms.

I also talked to Kelly about the film last March, before everything crashed; here’s that interview. And here’s how I describe the movie:

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is set in a 19th-century frontier settlement of tiny houses somewhere in Oregon, near the Columbia River, populated by people who are trying to scratch out a living in the New World, as well as the First Nations people who’ve been living there for generations. Into that settlement, a cow arrives, setting off a chain of events that are both momentous and small. But the film is about much more than just that.

First Cow is also a gentle (and gently devastating) tale about male friendship, about finding someone to share your aspirations and dreams with, and, most deliciously, about cooking. It’s also about the kinds of constructed hierarchies — based on factors like race, class, money, and firepower — that seem to be imposed on the world wherever new civilizations pop up.

Unrelatedly, my friend Sam Thielman and I have started a podcast, which we have cheekily named Young Adult Movie Ministry. We’ll be talking about Christian pop culture, largely of our past, mostly movies, and the first was The Late Great Planet Earth, the bestselling 1970 Hal Lindsey book that spawned a 1976 documentary narrated by — wait for it — Orson Welles. I know!

Anyhow, you can listen here.