Train Dreams (2025)

A Life in Timber and Time - Train Dreams review by griggs

There’s a gentleness here that feels like one hard stare might blow it away. Train Dreams traces eighty years in the life of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), tucked away in the forests and rail towns of Idaho while the twentieth century rumbles past in the distance. Big history stays mostly off-screen; what we get are tiny choices, sudden losses, and the odd, stubborn flashes of grace that survive them.

Clint Bentley, co-writing again with Greg Kwedar after Sing Sing, has the same humane, unshowy grip: scenes are allowed to breathe, silences do as much work as dialogue, and Denis Johnson’s novella is honoured without being embalmed. Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon and Clifton Collins Jr. all add texture around Edgerton’s quietly staggering lead turn.

Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography is ravishing – natural light, smoke and shadow doing half the acting – and I genuinely regret not catching this in a cinema; those skies and sounds deserve a big screen. It’s unhurried and very quiet, and if you’re not on its wavelength you might say “nothing happens”. If you are, it’s quietly restorative. A small, luminous film, and one of the year’s standouts for me.