Train Dreams
Netflix | Release Date: November 7, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
88
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
40
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonNov 20, 2025
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. Read full review
100
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonNov 20, 2025
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Edgerton in this role. Though he’s a prolific actor, he’s still underestimated; he’s at his most superb when his manner is gentle, and he’s capable of doing so much with so little. Read full review
100
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaNov 19, 2025
There are certain movies that grab you from the jump, and Train Dreams is one of them — as the film began its journey, I felt instantly connected to it; engrossed, near hypnotized. I didn't want it to end. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearNov 12, 2025
It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment. Read full review
100
Time OutIan FreerNov 6, 2025
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is a peach of a picture. At once miniaturist yet epic, it’s an exquisite film that touches on every human emotion – agony, ecstasy, discovery, surprise, togetherness, loneliness – without contrivance or strain. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 12, 2025
A birth-to-death character study, “Train Dreams” is a meditation on the beauty of everyone and everything, how we are connected to both the earth and those who walked it before us. Read full review
100
The TimesKevin MaherJan 31, 2025
Past western, part romance, part philosophical treatise, this Sundance Film Festival stunner also feels like the greatest Terrence Malick film that Malick never made. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriJan 31, 2025
In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyJan 29, 2025
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. Read full review
93
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzNov 19, 2025
Edgerton doesn’t allow pity or easy sympathy to seep in. Things are hard, things fall apart. And sometimes it all comes together. It’s a living. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubJacob OllerNov 6, 2025
Train Dreams, at just 95 minutes before credits, is as efficient, accessible, and poignant as a good short story. Read full review
91
Original-CinChris KnightNov 5, 2025
Ultimately, Train Dreams is a unique concoction, and a journey worth taking for its own keening moments of grief and simple wisps of joy. Read full review
91
The PlaylistMarshall ShafferFeb 3, 2025
A good film captures merely a life. A great film like Train Dreams encompasses an entire way of life. Bentley’s modest, moving epic of the common man is a thing of rare beauty. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekNov 24, 2025
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. Read full review
90
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 13, 2025
The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living. Read full review
90
Film ThreatBradley GibsonNov 12, 2025
The film is a monumental achievement, rolling in like distant thunder and lightning seen through the treeline. Read full review
90
The RevealKeith PhippsNov 6, 2025
Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesMark OlsenNov 6, 2025
Told with an unassuming, gentle simplicity that grows into an accumulating emotional power, the film manages to feel very small and specific while also vast and expansive. Read full review
90
ColliderRoss BonaimeOct 31, 2025
Train Dreams is without a doubt one of the most extraordinary films of this year, the type that will stick with you, deep in your mind and heart, long after the credits roll. Read full review
90
The New YorkerJustin ChangFeb 13, 2025
The result invites obvious yet not inapt comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick, but Bentley’s film—for all its crystalline imagery, its vision of Grainier’s home as a fallen Eden, and its air of metaphysical wonderment—unfolds in a more dramatically direct, compacted register. Read full review
90
TheWrapChase HutchinsonJan 29, 2025
A Western epic of breathtaking visual splendor and formidable lyrical cinematic poetry, it’s a work containing all the wondrous, devastating layers of an entire life, which it explores with a gentle grace without hiding from the agony that comes with it. Read full review
90
VarietyPeter DebrugeJan 29, 2025
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. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 15, 2026
The film captures a specific fissure in American history, where the ancient, superstitious wilderness was beginning to yield to the steam and steel of the industrial age. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 5, 2025
Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark. Read full review
88
The Travers TakePeter TraversNov 7, 2025
Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones bring flesh-and-blood immediacy to this classic in the making. about the beauty and terror of pioneering railroad days. A tough sell? Maybe. But not when a movie dares to reach for the stars like this one. Read full review
88
Washington PostTravis M. AndrewsNov 6, 2025
This meditation on life is a 102-minute respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonNov 6, 2025
This is a gorgeous movie to look at, to listen to, and to experience on an emotional level. Read full review
85
Paste MagazineJesse HassengerNov 7, 2025
It deserves a big screen if possible, though; Bentley and Kwedar have made an enveloping movie, one that might more closely echo its obvious influences from the comfort of home. This is a movie that belongs out in the beautiful, terrible world. Read full review
83
IndieWireRyan LattanzioJan 29, 2025
With an economy of story elements and set design — where most of the movie takes place in nature’s open expanses — Bentley has crafted a plaintive and affecting film about how every moment holds value. Read full review
80
EmpireJohn NugentNov 26, 2025
Haunting, serenely composed and beautiful, this is an elegy for a life and a country that America used to be.  Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinNov 12, 2025
Nothing about it should work as a film, yet almost everything does. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyNov 6, 2025
Bentley sometimes leans too heavily on lyricism and voiceover, but the film’s earnestness and restraint cast a strange spell. Train Dreams may mourn a disappearing US, but, more movingly, its muted reverence salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with. Read full review
80
IGNCarlos MoralesNov 6, 2025
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. Read full review
80
Little White LiesLaura VenningNov 6, 2025
The result is a melancholic, Terrence Malick-ian vision of a place that is brutal, beautiful and forever lost to time. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawNov 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. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim GriersonJan 29, 2025
Director Clint Bentley sculpts a sentimental story whose gentle ironies and modest design have a cumulative power. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrNov 19, 2025
Bentley’s film is haunting and patient, a dreamlike journey through a world that was disappearing in real time and an ode to the beauty that’s remained. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMichael PhillipsNov 7, 2025
Macy is the MVP here, delivering a detailed and very moving portrayal of Granier’s cohort on the job, an explosives specialist and natural-born environmentalist. Read full review
75
The Film StageDan MeccaJan 30, 2025
Train Dreams is a quiet, resilient work that will most likely age gracefully. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineDavid RobbOct 15, 2025
The film’s mythologizing is refreshingly measured, and it offers an appealingly earnest take on the American story. Read full review
60
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiJan 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. Read full review
60
The GuardianAdrian HortonJan 29, 2025
At its best, writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have crafted a gorgeous and poignant film of quiet, bruised life in a fragile place, anchored by a magnificently sensitive and restrained performance from the still-underrated Edgerton. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 21, 2025
For all its attempted ethereal touches, Train Dreams never settles on a track that delivers one. Read full review
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