If you stand close enough to a passing train, the wind can knock the breath out of you. The old-timers said it could steal your memory too, that a fast-moving locomotive drags a piece of time behind it, sweeping away whatever isn’t bolted down in your heart. Watching Train Dreams feels a bit like that old superstition: as if the film slips past you with such force and sorrow and beauty that you look up at the end unsure how much of your own life it has carried off. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO

Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella is not an attempt to resurrect the frontier romance we’ve seen a hundred times. Instead, it examines the lives of the men who laid the tracks, felled the forests, and unknowingly built the country that would one day grow too loud for people l

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