India, Nov. 22 -- Clint Bentley has made one of the year's best films in Train Dreams, an adaptation of Denis Johnson's best-selling novella. I was reminded of the visual grandeur of Terrence Malick more than once, yet this is unmistakably original and true to its own medium. A film so sincerely lush and sombre in its depiction of the life of an ordinary worker striving for a better life. But how much can he do better?

It is the early 20th-century American West. We meet Robert Grainier (played by Joel Edgerton), a logger and railroad worker who minds his own business, working the land and helping to create a new world from scratch. Bentley, working here with co-writer Greg Kwedar, honours the source material by introducing a voiceover th...