The Best Hollywood Movie of 2025 with 95% RT Score is Hiding on Netflix

The cinematic landscape of 2025 has been a year of polarizing extremes. While Hollywood leaned heavily into high-octane sequels and neon-soaked multiverses, many of the year’s “sure bets” felt hollow, leaving audiences craving something tactile and soulful. Amidst the deafening noise of summer blockbusters, a quiet, staggering work of art slipped through the cracks. “Train Dreams,” directed by Clint Bentley, is the best American movie of the year that almost no one is talking about—despite boasting a near-perfect 95% Rotten Tomatoes score, and currently streaming on Netflix.

Adapted from Train Dreams Novella – Denis Johnson

Based on the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, the film spans eighty years in the life of Robert Grainier (played by a career-best Joel Edgerton), a laborer in the American West. From his arrival as an orphan on the Great Northern Railway to his final years witnessing the dawn of the space age, Grainier’s life is a tapestry of rugged toil and profound tragedy.

After losing his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their daughter to a catastrophic wildfire, Grainier becomes a ghost haunting his own life, seeking solace in the Idaho woods. Supported by a stellar ensemble—including William H. Macy, Kerry Condon, and Clifton Collins Jr., with evocative narration by Will Patton—the film is less a traditional biopic and more a visual poem about the “precarity of the natural order.”

Why It Stands Alone

In a year defined by digital artifice, Train Dreams separates itself through its “particular sonic and visual grasp of the intimidating and poetic splendor of America’s seldom-inhabited plains.” It is a film that demands you sit in the silence of the frontier. As noted in a glowing review by High On Films:

“Bentley’s rendition of the United States in the vestiges of its frontier days is more disembodied than anything Malick has ever done… Every moment Edgerton spends slumped against a rotting tree trunk or wading his fingers through the wind as though Gladys’s hair lies just at the end of their tips only serves to punctuate the incongruity of this man in a space that has provided the only sense of stability he’s ever known.”

What makes Train Dreams essential viewing isn’t just its beauty, but its honesty. It subtly critiques American expansionism, capturing the “disdainful treatment of migrants” and the heavy toll of progress without ever feeling like a lecture. It is a meditation on loneliness that somehow feels universal.

With a 7.5 on IMDb and a stellar critical reputation, it is a crime that this film hasn’t dominated the cultural conversation. Thankfully, you don’t have to hunt for it in a dusty archive.

• Status: Must-Watch

• Rotten Tomatoes: 95%

• Where to Watch: Currently streaming on Netflix

Don’t let the year end without experiencing the film that reminds us what cinema is truly