Review: ‘Train Dreams’
2025 / Dir. Clint Bentley
☆ 3.5/5
In Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a lifetime of moments stitch together like tapestry. Following a gentle, early 20th-century logger named Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), the film flutters through these moments with stillness and observance. Some moments are dreamlike in the quiet comfort of love and domestic life. Others are mournful in the wake of mystifying tragedy. Some are punctuated by the company of friends and passerby. And others are disrupted by visions of a train, the philosophical engine to the story’s entanglement between the guilt of deforestation and the promise of a new world forged by railroads where those forests once stood. As a collection of images, it’s a sight to behold. But having been adapted from the beloved novella by Denis Johnson, the story’s visual poetry only takes it so far, leaving much to be desired that perhaps only the words of its source could satisfy.