| Netflix | Release Date: November 7, 2025 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
40
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The film acknowledges the bones of Johnson’s story—a very thin narrative in terms of things actually happening, though the things that happen are enormous. The execution is nevertheless lush, sometimes startlingly beautiful, and painterly and evocative of Johnson’s elegiac theme about a bygone America. The Old World is never old until it’s gone, but in Train Dreams one feels it passing.
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The passage of time is somehow both fluid and jagged in Clint Bentley’s soulful film of the Denis Johnson novella, Train Dreams. It flows or ambles or bumps along, passing over moments of joy, shock, discovery, lonesomeness or devastating sadness, but just as often over seemingly mundane experiences that only later reveal their significance when we look back.
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Train Dreams is stunning to look at, the kind of film where each blade of grass, each jagged tree branch, each mini ripple of a rushing river, seems to sing out as an individual. Yet somehow, none of these images come off as overdone or fetishistic. What Bentley keys into, above all else, are his actors, particularly Edgerton.
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Just because Malick’s influence can be felt does not mean that Bentley hasn’t found his own vocabulary to tell Grainier’s story. At times, Train Dreams feels almost quilt-like in the way its pieces fit together, with certain sounds and images flickering briefly, almost subliminally, across our consciousness, often to echo further on.
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Train Dreams is a gentle but poignant pastoral Western chronicling a life lived over many years. Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones are excellent, Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is gorgeous, and Clint Bentley’s direction is far more careful and considered than you might expect for a filmmaker with so few features under their belt.
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The GuardianNov 6, 2025
Greg Kwedar has adapted the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson; the director is Clint Bentley, and they have created a lovely looking, deeply felt film, clearly absorbing the influences of Terrence Malick in some of the low camera positions, sunset-hour compositions, narrative voiceovers, and epiphanically revealed glories of the American landscape.
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Screen RantJan 29, 2025
At times, the movie is deeply compelling, but its complexities can get lost in the shuffle and repetition of the same points. Striking cinematography and philosophical reflections can’t make up for this too-slow film that pokes at life’s meaningful moments without inspecting them further.
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