Extra Credit: Five Movies on Trains to Stream After ‘The 15:17 to Paris’
In the weekly column Extra Credit, Charles Bramesco recommends supplemental viewing for moviegoers whose interests have been piqued by a given week’s big new release.
Choo choo! All aboard The 15:17 to Paris, Clint Eastwood’s latest paean to the heroism of ordinary Americans and the final piece of an unofficial Huge With Dads trilogy alongside American Sniper and Sully. The drama retells the incredible true story of Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos, lifelong friends who teamed with other passengers to subdue a gunman when he opened fire on their train from Amsterdam in August 2015. (The three pals portray themselves in the film, which is certainly an… interesting choice.) It’s a story about courage and duty and self-sacrifice and America, but it’s also a story about trains.
While locomotive travel has ebbed considerably due to the advent of things like ‘planes’ and ‘cars’ and ‘choosing not to go somewhere else,’ there remain plenty of excellent films that have constrained their events to a network of rail cars. It’s a pretty reliable concept, as demonstrated by the recent, excellent Snowpiercer (apocalypse on a train) and Train to Busan (zombie outbreak on a train). Heck, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery pretty much invented the language of cinema as we know it today. With so much history to cover, let’s heave another shovelful of coal into the engine and survey some of the best movies set on trains available to stream right now: