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The Goldfinch

2019

John Crowley

Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson ...

5.6

1,261

Drama A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

	Author	Review
United States	Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter	"A disappointing adaptation of a great book"	NEG
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"To the list of great books mangled by Hollywood, add 'The Goldfinch' (...) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Brian Truitt USA Today	"[It] tries hard to be a masterwork like the painting that shares its title but ends up feeling more like a forgery (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	David Ehrlich IndieWire	"One of the year's dullest films (...) When stripped of its softer details and denied the sheer velocity of its narrative sweep, the story 'The Goldfinch' tells feels utterly absurd.	NEG
United States	Richard Lawson Vanity Fair	"I wish all of Tartt’s tender and moving allegory (...) had space to bloom in the film. It doesn’t, and I left the film appreciative of its style and strong performances, but not emotionally altered in any lingering way."	NEU
United States	Ann Hornaday The Washington Post	"Overstuffed, overlong and utterly uninvolving, this is a movie that feels as morbidly trapped as the poor little bird of its title."	NEG
United States	Owen Gleiberman Variety	"Scrupulously faithful, yet still misses the book's captivating essence (...) A morose and downbeat movie, too lost in the maze of its designer seriousness, is what 'The Goldfinch' finally is.	NEG
United States	Peter Hartlaub SFGATE	"Watching 'The Goldfinch' is like reading a novel where someone ripped out every third page from front to back"	NEG
United States	Richard Roeper Chicago Sun-Times	"It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie that aims for the fences again and again in the course of 149 minutes — but nearly every one of those mighty cuts is a swing and a miss"	NEU
United States	Johnny Oleksinski New York Post	"In simultaneously successfully shoving in every little thing and thus ruining the book, director John Crowley and writer Peter Straughan have killed two birds with one stone (...) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Matt Goldberg Collider	"It lacks the style or substance to be anything more than a gigantic waste of time."	NEG
United States	Chris Tilly IGN	"While it’s sumptuously shot, and filled with big stars delivering fine performances, the movie never quite gets under the skin of the book’s rich tapestry of characters."	NEU
United Kingdom	Nick De Semlyen Empire	"[It] fails to pay off. Frankly, you might have more fun watching a pigeon for 149 minutes (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Benjamin Lee The Guardian	"It’s a handsomely made adaptation that might lack a particularly distinctive style (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Clarisse Loughrey The Independent	"A disastrous translation of Donna Tartt’s book (...) A pretty tiresome thing to watch (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Tim Robey Telegraph	"The film pours its actors and other resources down a hole, including wastefully fine photography by Roger Deakins (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United Kingdom	David Sexton London Evening Standard	"Dull, shapeless and unconvincing. Watching it is not like seeing a film with its own logic and impetus but rather like being subjected to a protracted series of unnecessary illustrations to the novel (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
Ireland	Brian Lloyd entertainment.ie	"It feels like it's overstuffed with ideas and none of them actually get through on the screen (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
Ireland	Donald Clarke Irish Times	"The patina of superficial quality is so robust it’s hard to think of 'The Goldfinch' as 'a bad film' exactly (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
Ireland	Alan Corr RTÉ	"There is never a sense that Crowley has brought this occasionally silly and always portentous story under his full control (...) Our advice? Read a good book (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG

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