1. Brief Encounter (1945)
Train stations are sites of chance meetings and tearful goodbyes. In Brief Encounter, a piece of grit in the wake of a passing train gets stuck in the eye of Laura, a contently-married Englishwoman. When the kindly, handsome doctor, Alec, fishes it out, it’s the first in a series of fortuitous meetings which set the stage for a doomed romance. Laura’s weekly groceries-and-errands train trips, marked first by delicious anticipation, eventually grow hopeless and melancholic. Both lovers are sensitive to their duties towards their families; their sense of morality only makes the romance all the more tender and tragic. The train, its bustling platform, the station’s little tea shop: these mundane settings all become indelibly emotional spaces. As I write this, I’m recalling the Rachmaninoff score which swells as Laura rests her cheek against the train window, resigned to her loneliness, and feeling it settle around my heart like molten lead.
2. Before Sunrise (1995)
A love letter to spontaneity. On a train from Budapest, Frenchwoman Céline moves seats to avoid a fighting couple. When she lands across the aisle from American Jesse, he seizes the opportunity for a conspiratorial whisper: does she know what they’re arguing about? Their relationship begins with the easy camaraderie between travellers in shared circumstances. They trade witticisms in the lounge car, with Jesse revealing he’s been floating around Europe in trains for weeks. “I’ll tell you, sitting for weeks on end looking out the window has actually been kinda great… you have ideas you ordinarily wouldn’t have”. He gets it—something about the slow, meditative rocking of the train’s motion is almost trance-like. As time rolls on, it asks you to consider where you fit into it: where have you come from, where are you headed, who will you be when you get there? They disembark together in Vienna, roaming the city till their romance is brought to a pause back at the station. They’ll meet again at Track 9, six months from now, at 6 o’clock.
3. Nayak (1966)
Seminal filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Nayak sees Bengali movie star, Arindam, on an overnight trip to receive an award. Here, the train is a space of both collisions and reflection. As he embarks, he’s in sunglasses and smoking a cigarette: suave, impenetrable, and bloated on his own fame. But when charmingly irreverent journalist, Aditi, approaches him for an interview, he’s pushed into a surreal vortex of memories marked by betrayal and shame. As the train inches closer to its destination, we watch Arindam unravel under the weight of his past immoralities. There are two journeys, one extending into the future and another retracing the past. Vignettes of other passengers, tiny moral tales in their own right, inject humour and energy into a richly introspective movie.
4. La Chimera (2023)
I was misled into thinking this movie would be lush and romantic... I would probably describe it as heat-withered and overripe instead. But rotting fruit has its own charm! The opening train ride interrupts the nap of dishevelled British archaeologist, Arthur, who wears the sweltering Italian heat like a second skin. He spends the movie staggering around the countryside in a near-hypnagogic state, pilfering Etruscan artifacts with a swearing, singing crew of ragtag graverobbers. For Arthur, trains are where dreams and reality blur and ghosts borrow the bodies of the living. Their destinations are marked by disco, banditry, and mirages. My friend said the movie made her want to dig a big hole.
5. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Reader, Wes Anderson’s titular Darjeeling Limited was the train that started it all. Three American brothers—wealthy, obnoxious, and strangely sympathetic—reunite for a trip across India a year after their father’s death. Richly ornamented in marigold and cobalt, the train is a rattling dollhouse-on-wheels. Squashed into tiny bunks and bathrooms through Anderson’s trademark use of frames within frames, the brothers have no choice but to contend with their estrangement. The Orientalist “white people on a spiritual journey in Asia” schtick is certainly done to death, but describing this gorgeous, sensitive movie in such a simplistic way is plainly in bad faith. A jewel-toned homage to the work of Satyajit Ray, Darjeeling Limited is nothing short of reverent in its portrayal of the country. It earns another nod for its summery travel soundtrack, which features classical themes from Indian filmmakers like Ray alongside The Kinks and Rolling Stones. If I had the money for it, I would be living this movie right now.
6. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Pure kinetic energy distilled into 83 minutes, this movie starts off running and never stops. We’re dropped into London during peak Beatlemania, watching the four young musicians sprint to catch their train with throngs of rabid fans in hot pursuit. Waddling through the aisle with their matching bowl cuts and little suits, they evoke the same disbelief as a clown troupe piling into a tiny car. Between the cramped spaces, dynamic editing, and fast-paced dialogue that teeters from witty to absurd, the resultant experience is joyously restless. At one point, the band runs and bikes along the train to better pester a fellow passenger. Paul McCartney’s troublemaking grandfather is imprisoned in a carriage with chickens. A poker match therein turns into a full performance of “You Love Me Too.” At no point do hijinks abate, and neither does the pleasure of the watch.
7. Design for Living (1933)
When pitching this movie to friends, I like to describe it as a proto-Challengers (2024). A young artist is seated with two sleeping men on her train to Paris and can’t help but sketch them. They awaken to find her now asleep, her sketchbook ajar to her cartoons of their faces. A love triangle ensues. In Gilda’s inability to choose a favourite, she instead moves in with them as a platonic muse-slash-agent. There would be no movie if this ended cleanly. We’re thus left with a playful romantic comedy with occasional pre-Code brazenness. The profusion of Old Hollywood pictures in this article makes sense when you consider that in cinema’s early stages, it operated according to the dictum of efficiency. The narrative economy of a train setting was thus highly valuable—think few characters, a minimal number of sets, and single, linear plotlines.
8. Some Like It Hot (1959)
The jazzy and riotous Some Like It Hot follows Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry who disguise themselves as women while on the lam from the mafia. The newly christened Josephine and Daphne join an all-female band on a train to Miami, where they become smitten with ukulele player Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe. The band's raucous drinking and partying is dialed to the max by their sheer compaction. One particularly outrageous section makes full use of the bunk beds in the sleeping car: to Josephine’s chagrin, a private drink in Sugar’s bunk becomes a game of sardines when an impossible number of women crowd in for some fun. It’s a hilarious, little-seen vision of girlhood predicated in good-natured chaos. As Josephine and Daphne contend with vying for Sugar’s attention while maintaining their ruse in painfully close quarters and steering clear of the mob, what follows is a shockingly progressive sex comedy full of false identities and jaunty little tunes.
9. Jab We Met (2007)
A movie so bubbly and mischievously sweet that it’ll make you itch for misadventures of your own. Aditya, the heir to a corporate empire, wanders onto an overnight train in a depressed fugue. Enter Geet, a gutsy, fast-talking (bordering on manic) passenger who turns his life around by entangling him in a series of troublesome shenanigans. The two find themselves stranded in an empty station past midnight, implicated in a police bust, and scheming Geet’s elopement with her dopey boyfriend. Travel isn’t the means to a destination, but is itself the heart of the story and its romance; they spend the movie in a constant state of motion, performing vibrant Bollywood dance numbers while weaving through the gorgeous natural vistas of Punjab and the Himalayas.
10. Strangers on a Train (1951)
This article would be amiss without a Hitchcock entry. The director has train set pieces in many of his works, but none more notable than Strangers on a Train. This movie veers from our course thus far; its chance meeting is neither romantic nor introspective. Tennis star Guy is troubled by his estranged wife’s refusal to divorce him. When he is approached by the oily, cheerful psychopath Bruno in a dining car, their polite conversation is soured by a violent proposal. As crisp monochrome landscapes rush by to the clatter of dinnerware, Bruno reveals that he wants his father dead. He and Guy can escape suspicion if, like the tracks of a train, they "criss-cross" murders—he believes that by virtue of being perfect strangers with no connection or motives, they can make a clean break. A dark twist on the unique convergences possible between passengers on a train—not indulging in romantic reunions, but languidly plotting brutal schemes—the movie opens with the screech of a whistle and careens off the rails nearly immediately.
1. Brief Encounter (1945)
Train stations are sites of chance meetings and tearful goodbyes. In Brief Encounter, a piece of grit in the wake of a passing train gets stuck in the eye of Laura, a contently-married Englishwoman. When the kindly, handsome doctor, Alec, fishes it out, it’s the first in a series of fortuitous meetings which set the stage for a doomed romance. Laura’s weekly groceries-and-errands train trips, marked first by delicious anticipation, eventually grow hopeless and melancholic. Both lovers are sensitive to their duties towards their families; their sense of morality only makes the romance all the more tender and tragic. The train, its bustling platform, the station’s little tea shop: these mundane settings all become indelibly emotional spaces. As I write this, I’m recalling the Rachmaninoff score which swells as Laura rests her cheek against the train window, resigned to her loneliness, and feeling it settle around my heart like molten lead.
2. Before Sunrise (1995)
A love letter to spontaneity. On a train from Budapest, Frenchwoman Céline moves seats to avoid a fighting couple. When she lands across the aisle from American Jesse, he seizes the opportunity for a conspiratorial whisper: does she know what they’re arguing about? Their relationship begins with the easy camaraderie between travellers in shared circumstances. They trade witticisms in the lounge car, with Jesse revealing he’s been floating around Europe in trains for weeks. “I’ll tell you, sitting for weeks on end looking out the window has actually been kinda great… you have ideas you ordinarily wouldn’t have”. He gets it—something about the slow, meditative rocking of the train’s motion is almost trance-like. As time rolls on, it asks you to consider where you fit into it: where have you come from, where are you headed, who will you be when you get there? They disembark together in Vienna, roaming the city till their romance is brought to a pause back at the station. They’ll meet again at Track 9, six months from now, at 6 o’clock.
3. Nayak (1966)
Seminal filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Nayak sees Bengali movie star, Arindam, on an overnight trip to receive an award. Here, the train is a space of both collisions and reflection. As he embarks, he’s in sunglasses and smoking a cigarette: suave, impenetrable, and bloated on his own fame. But when charmingly irreverent journalist, Aditi, approaches him for an interview, he’s pushed into a surreal vortex of memories marked by betrayal and shame. As the train inches closer to its destination, we watch Arindam unravel under the weight of his past immoralities. There are two journeys, one extending into the future and another retracing the past. Vignettes of other passengers, tiny moral tales in their own right, inject humour and energy into a richly introspective movie.
4. La Chimera (2023)
I was misled into thinking this movie would be lush and romantic... I would probably describe it as heat-withered and overripe instead. But rotting fruit has its own charm! The opening train ride interrupts the nap of dishevelled British archaeologist, Arthur, who wears the sweltering Italian heat like a second skin. He spends the movie staggering around the countryside in a near-hypnagogic state, pilfering Etruscan artifacts with a swearing, singing crew of ragtag graverobbers. For Arthur, trains are where dreams and reality blur and ghosts borrow the bodies of the living. Their destinations are marked by disco, banditry, and mirages. My friend said the movie made her want to dig a big hole.
5. The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Reader, Wes Anderson’s titular Darjeeling Limited was the train that started it all. Three American brothers—wealthy, obnoxious, and strangely sympathetic—reunite for a trip across India a year after their father’s death. Richly ornamented in marigold and cobalt, the train is a rattling dollhouse-on-wheels. Squashed into tiny bunks and bathrooms through Anderson’s trademark use of frames within frames, the brothers have no choice but to contend with their estrangement. The Orientalist “white people on a spiritual journey in Asia” schtick is certainly done to death, but describing this gorgeous, sensitive movie in such a simplistic way is plainly in bad faith. A jewel-toned homage to the work of Satyajit Ray, Darjeeling Limited is nothing short of reverent in its portrayal of the country. It earns another nod for its summery travel soundtrack, which features classical themes from Indian filmmakers like Ray alongside The Kinks and Rolling Stones. If I had the money for it, I would be living this movie right now.
6. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Pure kinetic energy distilled into 83 minutes, this movie starts off running and never stops. We’re dropped into London during peak Beatlemania, watching the four young musicians sprint to catch their train with throngs of rabid fans in hot pursuit. Waddling through the aisle with their matching bowl cuts and little suits, they evoke the same disbelief as a clown troupe piling into a tiny car. Between the cramped spaces, dynamic editing, and fast-paced dialogue that teeters from witty to absurd, the resultant experience is joyously restless. At one point, the band runs and bikes along the train to better pester a fellow passenger. Paul McCartney’s troublemaking grandfather is imprisoned in a carriage with chickens. A poker match therein turns into a full performance of “You Love Me Too.” At no point do hijinks abate, and neither does the pleasure of the watch.
7. Design for Living (1933)
When pitching this movie to friends, I like to describe it as a proto-Challengers (2024). A young artist is seated with two sleeping men on her train to Paris and can’t help but sketch them. They awaken to find her now asleep, her sketchbook ajar to her cartoons of their faces. A love triangle ensues. In Gilda’s inability to choose a favourite, she instead moves in with them as a platonic muse-slash-agent. There would be no movie if this ended cleanly. We’re thus left with a playful romantic comedy with occasional pre-Code brazenness. The profusion of Old Hollywood pictures in this article makes sense when you consider that in cinema’s early stages, it operated according to the dictum of efficiency. The narrative economy of a train setting was thus highly valuable—think few characters, a minimal number of sets, and single, linear plotlines.
8. Some Like It Hot (1959)
The jazzy and riotous Some Like It Hot follows Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry who disguise themselves as women while on the lam from the mafia. The newly christened Josephine and Daphne join an all-female band on a train to Miami, where they become smitten with ukulele player Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe. The band's raucous drinking and partying is dialed to the max by their sheer compaction. One particularly outrageous section makes full use of the bunk beds in the sleeping car: to Josephine’s chagrin, a private drink in Sugar’s bunk becomes a game of sardines when an impossible number of women crowd in for some fun. It’s a hilarious, little-seen vision of girlhood predicated in good-natured chaos. As Josephine and Daphne contend with vying for Sugar’s attention while maintaining their ruse in painfully close quarters and steering clear of the mob, what follows is a shockingly progressive sex comedy full of false identities and jaunty little tunes.
9. Jab We Met (2007)
A movie so bubbly and mischievously sweet that it’ll make you itch for misadventures of your own. Aditya, the heir to a corporate empire, wanders onto an overnight train in a depressed fugue. Enter Geet, a gutsy, fast-talking (bordering on manic) passenger who turns his life around by entangling him in a series of troublesome shenanigans. The two find themselves stranded in an empty station past midnight, implicated in a police bust, and scheming Geet’s elopement with her dopey boyfriend. Travel isn’t the means to a destination, but is itself the heart of the story and its romance; they spend the movie in a constant state of motion, performing vibrant Bollywood dance numbers while weaving through the gorgeous natural vistas of Punjab and the Himalayas.
10. Strangers on a Train (1951)
This article would be amiss without a Hitchcock entry. The director has train set pieces in many of his works, but none more notable than Strangers on a Train. This movie veers from our course thus far; its chance meeting is neither romantic nor introspective. Tennis star Guy is troubled by his estranged wife’s refusal to divorce him. When he is approached by the oily, cheerful psychopath Bruno in a dining car, their polite conversation is soured by a violent proposal. As crisp monochrome landscapes rush by to the clatter of dinnerware, Bruno reveals that he wants his father dead. He and Guy can escape suspicion if, like the tracks of a train, they "criss-cross" murders—he believes that by virtue of being perfect strangers with no connection or motives, they can make a clean break. A dark twist on the unique convergences possible between passengers on a train—not indulging in romantic reunions, but languidly plotting brutal schemes—the movie opens with the screech of a whistle and careens off the rails nearly immediately.