TRAIN DREAMS (2025)

I have often said that the literary form best suited for filmic adaptation is not the sprawling, multivalent, capital-N Novel but rather the more modestly sized but still substantial lower-case-n novella, and I'm more than ready to seize upon this film (based on Denis Johnson's novella) and The Life of Chuck (based on Steven King's novella) as validatory evidence for this point: both are modestly sized but still substantial lower-case type films, broadly pleasant, competently made, economically thrifty—in a word, successful.  We would do well to have more films like these, and, for that matter, we would do well to have more novellas, and Hollywood's interest in the form can only be a good thing...

And yet a nagging voice remains. Films with small-scale ambitions can risk becoming slight; the warm satisfactions of their tidy epiphanies can risk becoming gauzy. Life of Chuck runs these risks and so does this: I enjoyed just about every moment as it flickered before me but I'm not sure if I'll remember a single frame by this time next year (though odds are even that I'll hold on to William H. Macy's fine turn as the dotty old-timer with the demolition equipment.)

A ★★★½ review of Train Dreams (2025)

I have often said that the literary form best suited for filmic adaptation is not the sprawling, multivalent, capital-N Novel but rather the more modestly sized but still substantial lower-case-n novella, and I’m more than ready to seize upon this film (based on Denis Johnson’s novella) and The Life of Chuck (based on Steven King’s novella) as validatory evidence for this point: both are modestly sized but still substantial lower-case type films, broadly pleasant, competently made, economically thrifty--in a word, successful. We would do well to have more films like this, and, for that matter, we would do well to

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