THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

The first word that come to mind when considering director Kelly Reichardt’s marvelous new frontier drama 'First Cow' is *nice*. It is a gentle, unhurried story about a pair of mostly decent people whose loftiest ambition is to carve out a modestly comfortable niche for themselves by touting life’s simple pleasures. This makes 'First Cow' something of an outlier in Reichardt’s work. Even in the filmmaker’s more superficially placid works, an exhausting angst is…