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Netflix Releases 'Train Dreams,' Denis Johnson Adaptation Drawing Acclaim and Gotham Nominations

Director Clint Bentley says the film’s deliberate ambiguity serves its portrait of grief and a vanishing American landscape.

Overview

  • The period drama is now streaming on Netflix following its November 21, 2025 release.
  • It adapts Denis Johnson’s novella, first published in The Paris Review in 2002 and later issued as a standalone book in 2011.
  • Clint Bentley directs and co-writes with Greg Kwedar, with Joel Edgerton leading a cast that includes Felicity Jones and William H. Macy, and narration by Will Patton.
  • The film has garnered strong reviews and received 2025 Gotham Film Awards nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
  • Bentley emphasizes a pivotal, intentionally unresolved moment as central to how the story explores mourning without offering definitive answers.