QUICK HIT: Train Dreams [2025]

December 19, 2025

1–2 minutes

Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 102 minutes
Release Date: November 7th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Netflix
Director(s): Clint Bentley
Writer(s): Clint Bentley & Greg Kwedar / Denis Johnson (novella)

Just waiting to see what we were left here for.

The Malick comparisons are apt where aesthetic is concerned, but something tells me forty minutes of Clifton Collins Jr. aren’t on the cutting room floor a la Adrien Brody in The Thin Red Line. That’s not to say Clint Bentley doesn’t earn his praise for Train Dreams‘ beautifully powerful imagery and rumination on our place within the tapestry of life. Its vignetted fluidity just feels premeditated rather than discovered in the edit purely via gut instinct.

It’s easy to get caught in its themes, though, considering we’re experiencing a similar era of technological change and unchecked violence. I felt Robert’s uncertainty and confusion. His sense of growing old prematurely and wondering if he is of a different world or has simply been passed by. Must he endure such incredible tragedy to help augment that loss of identity? No. But it gives Bentley and author Denis Johnson the necessary drama to inject profundity into an otherwise familiarly mundane existence.

That said, Joel Edgerton is amazing. Perhaps the best work of an already impressive career. His Robert breaking down in tears in front of Ashton Singer’s Avery is a gut punch. His conversations with William H. Macy’s Arn, John Diehl’s Billy, and Kerry Condon’s Claire (all three are wonderful) prove a balm for the soul and a reminder that death is both undefeated and a crucial piece to this puzzle we call life.

So, I get why many love the film and others think it hollow. I don’t therefore mind finding myself stuck in the middle with the realization that its often shallow machinations do ultimately add up to a whole lot.