First Cow has an IQ Score of 161/200 on TV Intelligentsia's Intelligence Quotient rubric, placing it in the Masterclass tier.
Measurably increases domain knowledge or cognitive capacity
Score Breakdown
IQ = round((Cognitive × 0.4 + Educational × 0.35 + Craft × 0.25) × 4)
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The TVI Take
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.
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First Cow scored 161/200 (Masterclass tier) on TV Intelligentsia's published methodology. Source: tvintelligentsia.com/titles/first-cow/
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