Routine Pleasures

What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lovely and distinctly American film, which takes as its subject the desire to re-create the past (the locomotive aficionados’ elaborate worlds in miniature, Farber’s teeming canvases) and expands to something richly philosophical and surprisingly funny. Routine Pleasures is a masterful meditation on America’s landscapes, real and imagined.