The Goldfinch (2019)

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.

Fmovies: 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

Loved Deakins' cinematography in the movie - flawless and the reason I went on opening night. The last 25% of movie, strictly from a screenplay perspective, gets a bit convoluted, but that might be because I have not read the book and walked into it completely unaware of reviews and plot. The acting from the young Theo boy was impeccable - and Nicole Kidman, despite only a supporting role, was also superb. Luke Wilson - crushes it, as well!

The Goldfinch fmovies. Where do I start? All of the characters were amazing and so wonderfully written. Although the book was so much more detailed at 770+ pages, the movie did its best to bring it full circle. Both the main character Theo and his friend Boris had such messed up childhoods, and still they both found strength in each other. I loved their relationship as they both struggled for love. This movie is like none other, full of twists you cannot imagine. Nicole Kidman played her role perfectly, and so did all 4 actors playing the younger and older versions of Theo and Boris. Jeffrey Wright is especially memorable in this film as Hobie. Having just finished the book before seeing the film, I was very pleased with the adaptation.

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.

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 fo