The Goldfinch's reviews
Media reviews
The Guardian
It?s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt.
Vanity Fair
I wish all of Tartt?s tender and moving allegory?the way she pours the density of growth and regret into a solid thing that can pass hands?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.
USA Today
It?s a lot of soapy melodrama and underdeveloped characters that never really go anywhere.
The Hollywood Reporter
In the end, there?s too much good stuff missing and yet not enough to serve as a satisfying meal.
Variety
What you experience isn?t the book, exactly; it?s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.
Indiewire
The big problem with The Goldfinch ? a lifeless film that doesn?t consist of scenes so much as it does an awkward jumble of other, smaller problems stacked on top of each other like kids inside a trench coat ? is that it mistakes its source material for a great work of art.
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. Rather than spread its wings and fly free, it stays frustratingly, eternally inert.
Rolling Stone
The beauty of the costumes and production design merely create a gilded cage for gifted actors who appear and disappear at the director?s will, while given scant opportunity to develop characters.