Train Dreams is not only the best feature of 2025, it’s one of the decade’s great American films: a stirring tribute to this country and the anonymous men and women who built it; a paean to a fading landscape and a rugged, natural way of life; an elegy about the immediacy and eternity of grief; and a heartbreaking—and yet also hopeful—portrait of impermanence and the cinema’s ability to memorialize that which doesn’t last.

Jockey director Clint Bentley’s sophomore effort, which hits Netflix Nov. 21, is a profound story of an ordinary man—his joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams, hardships and grace—and immediately marks the filmmaker as an artist of tremendous precision, elegance, and acuity.

An adaptation of Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same name, it tells the quiet tale of Robert

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