Joel Edgerton Gives the Best Performance of His Career in Netflix’s New Frontier Drama

It’s practically cliché at this point to praise an actor’s role for being “quiet” or “lived in,” to marvel at performances that don’t feel like performances at all; the kind that bend reality just enough that we stop noticing the artifice and start believing what we’re seeing is simply life unfolding. But every so often, a film arrives that reminds us why that cliché is so damn compelling. Train Dreams is that film. Adapted from Denis Johnson’s novella, Clint Bentley’sSundancebreakout settles into the first half of the 20th century and watches the American West remade by rails, saws, and ambition. In that slow transformation, Joel Edgerton's Robert Granier carves a life from wilderness, his axe rising and falling in rhythm with a land that both provides for and rebels against him. Edgerton has always been excellent, but he ascends here to something rarer than “scene-stealing”: a rendering so intimate it feels like peering through someone’s life rather than witnessing a series of scenes strung together on a screen.