User reviews

Greetings again from the darkness. The challenge after watching this movie is deciding whether it needed more time or less. With a run time of two-and-a-half hours, that may seem like a ludicrous question, but Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize (fiction) winning 2013 novel was almost 800 pages long, covering many characters and spanning more than a decade. What to include and what to omit surely generated many discussions between director John Crowley (the excellent BROOKLYN, 2015) and screenwriter Peter Straughan (Oscar nominated for the fantastic TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, 2011).

13 year old Theo (Oakes Fegley) is visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother when a bomb explodes leaving Theo dazed in the rubble and his mother dead. An encounter with an injured stranger causes Theo to take a painting and flee the museum. Theo proceeds to hide the artwork as the family of one of his schoolmates takes him in. The painting is "The Goldfinch" by Rembrandt's pupil Carel Fabritius. In the first of many parallels separated by time, we learn Fabritius was killed (and most of his work destroyed) in an explosion. In fact, it's these parallels and near-mirror-images are what make the story so unique and interesting ... and so difficult to fit into a film.

When Theo's long-lost drunken shyster father (Luke Wilson) shows up with his equally smarmy girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson), they head to the recession-riddled suburbs of Las Vegas. It's here where Theo meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard, Richie from the two IT movies), a Ukranian emigrant living with his dad (yet another parallel). The two boys become friends, partaking in drugs, alcohol, and shoplifting. Another tragedy puts Theo on the run. He finds himself back in New York, where he takes up with Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), the partner of the stranger from the museum.

All of this is told from the perspective of young adult Theodore Decker, played by Ansel Elgort. We see him bunkered in a hotel room contemplating suicide. The story we watch shows how his life unfolded and landed him in this particular situation. And it's here where we find the core of the story. Circumstances in life guide our actions, and in doing so, reveal our true character. Theo carries incredible guilt over his mother, and his actions with Hobie, regardless of the reasons for doing so, lead him to a life that is not so dissimilar to that of adult Boris (Aneurin Barnard, DUNKIRK) when their paths cross again.

Other supporting work is provided by Ashleigh Cummings as Pippa, the object of Theo's desire, Willa Fitzgerald (played young Claire in "House of Cards") as Kitsey Barbour, Theo's fiancé, as well as Denis O'Hare, Peter Jacobson, and Luke Kleintank. As a special treat, Oscar winner Nicole Kidman plays Mrs. Barbour in what feels like two different performances. When Theo is young, she is the cold, standoffish surrogate mother who takes him in; however when older Theo returns, her own personal tragedies have turned her into a warm bundle of emotions in need of pleasantry. It's sterling work from an accomplished actress.

The segments of the film that resonate deepest are those featuring Oakes Fegley as young Theo. Fegley was so good in the criminally underseen WONDERSTRUCK (2017), and here he conveys so much emotion despite maintaining a stoic demeanor. It's rare to see such a layered performance from a young actor. Of course the film is helped immensely by the unequaled work of cinematographer Roger Deakins. Mr. Deakins finally won his first Oscar last year in his 14th nomination. Trevor Gureckis provides the music to fit the various moods and the two time periods. All of these elements work to give the film the look of an Oscar contending project; however, we never seem to connect with the older Theo, which leaves a hollow feeling to a story that should be anything but. Instead we are left to play "spot the parallels" ... a fun game ... but not engaging like we would hope.

Overall, well done film in terms of acting, cinematography, and ambiance. But if you walked into this film with no knowledge of the plot.. you'll walk out without knowing any more. It feels more like an extended trailer or light outline of the story rather than delving in to anything. Nothing is ever fully explained, silences brood with no answers, and overall just felt like it was completely missing a rich story line. Want to know the story? Read the book.

When Brooklyn came out in 2015, I was mesmerized by the sheer beauty of the picture visually, the story, and the all around fantastic performance by Saoirse Ronan. It was a great effort by John Crowley. So when I heard of The Goldfinch I had high expectations seeing as Crowley set the bar high with his last film. I didn't really care for the trailers though I knew it was based on a well acclaimed book. What can I say, this film is overlong, has a messy narrative, and most definitely has to be losing the meaning and importance of the book because this film is not remarkable.

The film is about a boy who loses his mom in a terrorist attack and then grows up in a foster home and then with his drunken and abusive biological father, followed by a friendly antique owner. The film goes through the protagonists struggle with identity, love, and the fact that he took a really expensive Goldfinch painting the day of the bombing, and this last fact comes back in to factor in different stages of his life. Even describing the plot just now was messy for me.

The film looks quite nice. Crowley's works look grand and intricate but that doesn't really cross the finish line. The main issue with this film is that it has no heart and loses what I assume is a lot of the books importance. Its a meandering tale that doesn't go deep enough and I felt like the last twenty minutes or so were just bad. The relevance of The Goldfinch is just lost on me and its just a moving plot device in a film that doesn't know what it wants to do.

I don't like to say it but The Goldfinch is masking around as Oscar bait but doesn't have a whole lot of quality. I didn't read Brooklyn either but the film feels magical and captures the era and aura of early 1900s Irish Brooklyn. This just feels like it sucks the main ideas of its basis and pastes it onto the screen. At a whopping 2 and a half hours, this film feels its length. Ambitious? Yes, but most certainly better left alone.

6/10

I have a hard fast rule. Never compare a movie to the book on which it is based. This, of course, is impossible in many ways. But one needs to accept the limitations of the silver screen. Little introspection, detail, character development, and so on. Obviously, with good direction and acting, we have a new telling of a tale. I really enjoyed the book here, but was astounded that a movie was being made of it. The dull portrayal of the cerebral nature of the plot doesn't stand up well. It kept my interest only in a how-are-they-going-to-show that kind of way. There is something so drab here. We are asked to glean all kinds of information from close-ups of the protagonist and Nicole Kidman. Connections fail. Suspense is non-existence and contrived. Some books just weren't meant to be movies.

It's not a bad movie, but it's only for people who read the book and can recognise the characters and storylines. The movie is rushed at times and we don't get the richness of the relationship of Theo and other key characters like Pippa. The underworld of stolen art market and antiques in the book is fascinating in the book but absent in the movie.

I hope authors of epic novels like The Goldfinch stop selling their books to movie producers and trust televsion/streaming services with their stories.

If you listen carefully and pay attention to all the details, you'll find the plot fits together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I enjoyed this movie immensely, a process that may have been helped by being able to turn on subtitles at home (which handled the mumbling and the background noise distractions). This was one clever script, but again, you have to stay alert. (I have not read the book.)

There are parts to this film that are good but the most enjoyable was watching the Younger Theo....for as young as he is i thought his acting was a Knock Out and his facial expressions are priceless! It's a very long film and a little complicated at times....you need to have patience to try and get thru 2.5 hours of this film.

It's been a few days since I watched the film and have done my best to wipe it from my memory. This is a cheaply written, dollar store version of Donna Tartt's prizewinning novel, The Goldfinch. Completely missed the mark.

Poor casting, hollow dialogue, distinct lack of chemistry between characters and poorly stitched together time leaps leave the audience confused and bored. Cinematography is often boring and predictable. The film is an absolute fiasco of rushed plot points and long scenes of embarrassingly unconvincing acting.

Save your evening, read the book instead.

I have not read the book, so am reviewing this as a film... and I found it gripping and moving. Visually superb and great acting along with an interesting story. I thought it was beautiful. I guess people are rating it low because it did not match up to the book, and this is sometimes the case I know. But my wife has read the book, and was very happy with the film. It definitely deserves more than 6.2, so please ignore this low-ish rating. Enjoy.

Engaging tale that takes us on the journey of a painting wrapped in the coming of age story of a boy. Luke Wilson give an Oscar worthy costarring performance along side Sarah Paulson

Many of the commenters here and elsewhere have been saying things like "Ignore the critics - it's a great film", and I went hoping that they would be proven right.

Alas, despite some fine acting from a few members of the cast (both Nicole Kidman and Sarah Paulson are excellent), the film cannot be recommended to those who, like me, were infatuated by the Donna Tart's novel. This seems to be due to the inherent tension between the screenplay's slavishly literal fidelity to the text, on the one hand, and to the choices it does makes (inevitably, given the book's sprawl), on the other.

Where it diverges from the novel, it does so in big and, I think, quite damaging ways (damaging, that is, to a film that presumably seeks to elicit the kind of intense involvement from its viewers that the book demanded from readers). One of these is the episodic, almost random way in which so many sequences seem to have been sliced, diced and glued back together in what seems to be no particular order. Too many of these sequences appear to be perfunctory -- brief exchanges of dialogue that serve only to fill in the backstory or to advance the plot line (assuming, under these circumstances that you can keep track of it), without any deeper meaning being conveyed by the acting or the cinematography. Much of the film thus plays like an extended trailer, edited to achieve specific effects without emotional or character-driven context. Even more damaging is the decision to portray the protagonist, Young Theo Decker, as younger than he is depicted in the book, in such a way that the Young Theo sequences are drained of much of their original meaning. In the book, Theo is portrayed as pubescent, and we are witnesses not just to events that he undergoes more or less passively, but to his sexual and emotional maturation. Oakes Fegley, the actor in question (who is not without talent - one could imagine him evolving into something along the lines of a Philip Seymour Hoffman), appears to be about that age, but, as is usual in American movies, the child he portrays is clearly meant to be younger. This unbalances and denatures his crucial relationship with Boris, the worldly-wise and thrillingly dangerous Ukrainian friend he meets in high school while exiled from New York to the outer fringes of Las Vegas. In the book, they are high schoolers; in the film, they appear to be more like middle schoolers, which distorts a lot of what is supposed to be going on. The film apparently got an R rating for its pervasive depictions of drug use and its brief episode of violence, but this is one of the ways in which, unlike the book, it stays far too safely - damagingly so - in PG-13 territory.

The leap from Young Theo to Young-Adult Theo (i.e, from Fegley to Ansel Elgort) is thus too abrupt to fit the story's time-scale. And, if it was the production team's intention to portray Young-Adult Theo as a twit (which, in retrospect, is a plausible reading of the book, though not mine), it succeeded beyond its wildest expectations. As a result, Elgort's all-too-transparently artificial emoting in the climaxes misses the mark - they never feel genuine and are, in some cases, downright embarrassing. A central character in a stem winder like this should, at the very least, have some charisma, but Elgort seems to have been told (and been costumed and bespectacled) to cool things down. Cooling seems to be the overall point, and it follows that the movie departs from the book in lacking heat.

Finally, a loud raspberry for the two Borises, Finn Wolfhard as Young Boris and Aneurin Barnard as the adult version. Both clearly had to expend a lot of effort on maintaining their would-be Slavic accents (which nonetheless slip in and out), to the detriment of their actual acting. No Russian or Ukrainian viewing this film is likely to believe in either character for one moment. This is customary in Hollywood, where the belief seems, absurdly, to be that dialect coaches can turn any actor into a credible linguistic clone. Far better to recruit genuine, in this case, Slavic actors (of whom there are plenty) and put the coaching resources into coaxing them into English intelligibility.

All these elements mean that I felt none of the involvement that had kept me glued to the book. Just as the critics had warned me.

Disclaimer: I have not read the novel this is based on.

As I didn't read the novel but heard so much of it's acclaim, I was excited to hear it was being adapted. So at least I would know the story. After seeing this film, I think I have a good idea of the plot. However, telling this story out of order may work in the book (again, I have no idea) but it fails spectacularly here. It's confusing to non-readers of the source material and it chops up character development as well as building emotional connections to the characters. If the characters were played by the same actors throughout maybe it wouldn't feel so abrupt. I think a book as long as 5he Goldfinch would have lent itself more to a limited series like Sharp Objects. I would have liked to see Tartt's characters come to screen as intended.

Dont expect that to be a bad thing. the movie is 2 hours and a half long, and the story isnt upbeat to make the time fly by. a lot of reviews made it seem like the movie wasnt worth watching but I did not regret it. the movie had a good storyline, and although there were manh flashbacks, it never seemed to be too much. it simply represented how memories are visualised. i would say that if you had the chance to read the book, read the book! i didnt read it but this movie was one of those were you could tell the book mustve had way more detail and stuff that still couldnt be managed to fit in the film

I know this film is based on a book, so it's completely worthless of me to say this but I'm going to say it anyway: if this film had been what the IMDb longline has it about, it would have been a very compelling film. If the last half an hour had been the first half an hour, you have a great film. As it is, you have a tedious 2 1/2 hour film trying to figure out how ANY of this is relevant and why should we care? They might as well advertised the film as a coming of age story after a boy loses his mom in a bombing. Only then would people have been prepared for the snoozefest that ensued. For those people saying this would have made a better miniseries: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? I can't imagine watching this crap for 6-8 weeks just for THAT to be the conclusion. I also see people praising the director because he did 'Brooklyn'-one: that was a bore of a film that reminded me of watching Nicholas sparks worst film and 2) roger deakins legendary cinematography couldn't save this movie. It want even that impressive, don't know what people are going on about. Anyway, as a screenwriter and video editor myself, I'm glad to see film critics have some sense left and won't fall for ALL oscar bait films. The worst part about this film is the waste of a cast. Oh well.

What a colossal waste of time. I voraciously read the book. It was a masterpiece in storytelling and character development. I couldn't put it down. Best book I've read in years. The movie is a total disaster. Awful acting all around aside from Nicole Kidman (Mrs. Barbour) and Jeffrey Wright (Hobie). The young and adult versions of Theo were painful to watch. Theo's childhood in Las Vegas is an amazing part of the book but it's reduced to about ten minutes of confusion in the movie. It is hard to find two young actors who can accurately portray alcoholic druggies and the actors who played Theo and Boris failed miserably. I just didn't believe their close bond at all. If I hadn't read the book I would have been totally confused by this whole movie. Scenes just thrown together. Great scenes left out entirely. I was really looking forward to the movie and am so disappointed with the result. Better direction and a better lead actor could have made all the difference.

I had high hopes for this movie ever since it was announced, as it had cast an all-star cast and the novel (though I never read it) was considered great, so when the negative reviews came out, I lowered my expectations going into the movie and I'm glad I did. The cinematography was great as well as the directing, Oakes Fegley is a star in the making and this is his movie. The remaining cast was pretty good and Finn Wolfhard, despite what critics are saying, nails the Russian accent. This movie represents life and how just one mistake can change your future drastically and it's not a movie for casual film-goers (as I thought 10 minutes could have been trimmed). All in all I loved The Goldfinch and don't let the critics convince you not to watch it.

I got to watch it at Toronto international Film Festival it's a good drama

I don't like writing negative reviews, but The Goldfinch is a grand disappointment.

With an all-star cast and intriguing premise, the failure isn't in the acting or delivery of dialog, locations or anything visual, Sad to say it's all in the overly long and melodramatic delivery.

Unlike other movies with similar themes - The Red Violin, The Postman ((Il Postino) and Shine - The Goldfinch lacks a tight script, leaving viewers languishing in front of the screen, hoping for the film's end or an excuse to slip out of the theater.

I really wanted to like this film, it's a grand disappointment. I give it four out of five stars.

I have no clue what those people are on about stating the story is confusing or that there's no story at all. To me it all made perfect sense, in fact I thought the storytelling was sublime, going back and forth in time, between the young and adult characters, it was all very easy to follow for once. The acting was excellent and that from the entire cast. The Goldfinch definitely deserves a higher rating on here. It's one of those movies I would watch again in the future. I wasn't expecting much of it to be honest, as the drama genre isn't really the genre I enjoy the most but this one stands out from the rest. A captivating story, excellent acting, very high quality of cinematography, I really can't write anything bad about The Goldfinch. Good job from the whole production team.

"The Goldfinch" is one long drawn out in depth drama film that's a journey of life and time of one young man who has been affected by tragedy and family. Based on an award winning play the movie is a coming of age story as it leaves the world of a New York City bombing in an art museum. Look for good supporting turns from heavyweights like Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, and Luke Wilson. Overall just an okay drama journey that's moved along by time and flashbacks.

Slow. SLOW. S.L.O.W. Two and a half hours of...."character development?" Not even. If I hadn't read the book, I wouldn't have had any idea what was going on; as it was I had to explain it to my partner throughout. What is wrong with writing a straightforward adaptation? The actual story is deep enough - all the back and forth mish-mash was tedious torture. Don't kill the actors, kill the screenplay!