The Goldfinch
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: September 13, 2019 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
40
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
24
Negative:
11
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranSep 12, 2019
While the result is not flawless, this is a polished, impressive attempt that pays off in the end. It may take awhile to get there, but its themes of loss, longing, heartache and betrayal, not to mention the nature and value of beautiful objects, do ultimately move us. Read full review
70
IGNChris TillySep 8, 2019
Theo is an engaging character – for the most part well played – and his journey is both entertaining and heartbreaking. Meaning much like the painting at the centre of this tale, Theo’s story both survives, and endures. despite the fragmented film’s shortcomings. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattSep 10, 2019
The Goldfinch feels like more than the sum of its disparate parts; a painting in the wrong frame, maybe, but one whose imperfect beauty still draws you in. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 14, 2019
We few, we not-easily-bored few, can catch “The Goldfinch” in a theater and revel in unerringly modulated performances — everybody is so softspoken that the verbal explosions have alarming violence about them — and a world we might envy, or at least resent a little bit. Read full review
63
The Associated PressLindsey BahrSep 12, 2019
The Goldfinch is stoic and sad, occasionally brilliant and more often confusing. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineChris BarsantiSep 10, 2019
Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 12, 2019
The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?” Read full review
60
The GuardianBenjamin LeeSep 8, 2019
It’s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt. Read full review
58
Vanity FairRichard LawsonSep 8, 2019
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. Read full review
50
SlateHeather SchwedelSep 14, 2019
The movie, even at two-and-a-half hours long, can’t fit in as much as does the 800-page novel, forcing director John Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughan to pare down a bit on details, characters, and plot. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperSep 12, 2019
It is an ambitious, dreamlike, beautifully shot movie (with cinematography by the legendary Roger Deakins) 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. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedSep 12, 2019
The Goldfinch arrives as one of the year’s deadliest disappointments. Read full review
50
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonSep 12, 2019
While there’s not exactly a lot of plot in The Goldfinch there is a lot of stuff, too much for even a 2 1/2 -hour movie. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneKatie WalshSep 12, 2019
The Goldfinch is both too long and too short; dull to watch but scanty on the details about logistics, character, and just how anything of note actually occurs. The mystery of the film is something to be endured, rather than solved. But the real mystery is our leading man. We never know who Theo is as an adult, or if we’re on his side, or why we should care. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 11, 2019
Although Peter Straughan’s stripped-down regurgitation of the story is faithful to Tartt’s narrative in the broadest sense of the word, it lacks elegance and depth. A Dickensian coming-of-age tale, The Goldfinch is at times dull and pretentious and never earns its 2.5-hour running length as an example of either art or entertainment. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy BurrSep 11, 2019
The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction. Read full review
50
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldSep 11, 2019
The Goldfinch feels like a series of often-elegant moments, in service to a story that never quite comes into focus. Read full review
50
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 8, 2019
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. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthySep 8, 2019
In the end, there’s too much good stuff missing and yet not enough to serve as a satisfying meal. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittSep 8, 2019
It’s a lot of soapy melodrama and underdeveloped characters that never really go anywhere. Read full review
45
TheWrapSteve PondSep 18, 2019
The Goldfinch, the novel, was a testament to the power of The Goldfinch, the painting – but The Goldfinch, the movie, can’t be more than a footnote to the mysteries and the grace of the works that inspired it. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Sep 10, 2019
It’s an empty approximation of art, all gleaming surfaces masking a hollow center. And unlike a fake vintage chair, there’s no basic utility to this imitation. Read full review
42
The PlaylistJason BaileySep 8, 2019
Perhaps the pieces could have held together with the right leading man as glue. Elgort is, assuredly, not that. Read full review
40
The Observer (UK)Simran HansOct 3, 2019
Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 26, 2019
The film always looks good under the eye of cinematographer Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Peter Straughan renders some elegant and amusing dialogue, but this Goldfinch stays earthbound. Read full review
40
EmpireNick de SemlyenSep 23, 2019
An earnest stab at crunching a brilliant breezeblock of a novel down to film-size, but one that fails to pay off. Frankly, you might have more fun watching a pigeon for 149 minutes. Read full review
40
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 13, 2019
The Goldfinch, director John Crowley’s prestige adaptation of Donna Tartt’s beautifully detailed novel, isn’t a great movie; it’s hardly even an OK one. Yet there’s something wistfully unfortunate about it. From its casting to its structure to its layering of visual textures, you can almost see how every good intention and carefully considered judgment call has somehow gone wrong. Read full review
40
CNNBrian LowrySep 13, 2019
The Goldfinch has a painting at its center, but despite a classy palette of ingredients conjures a lifeless, disjointed picture. Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the movie represents a transparent bid to bring the book's prestige to the screen, but it's another case of literary underpinnings being lost in translation. Read full review
40
VoxAlissa WilkinsonSep 12, 2019
I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it. Read full review
40
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 11, 2019
On its way to an uncathartic climax that somehow involves a black-market-fenced oil painting and an Amsterdam shootout, The Goldfinch throws in so much diversionary character work that you wonder if anyone thought the stew was going to be edible. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 10, 2019
Crowley knows his way from adaptations thanks to 2015′s Brooklyn, but as this 149-minute mess proves, The Goldfinch should have never flown away from its literary perch. Read full review
38
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 10, 2019
If Tartt’s book is about grief and the sudden trauma that can derail a life’s trajectory, Crowley’s film feels like it doesn’t understand either of those things at all, merely using them as exploitative decoration on a beautiful but shockingly hollow experience. Read full review
35
The AtlanticDavid SimsSep 12, 2019
The film suffers from both an excessive faithfulness to its source and a general failure to translate that material into anything close to a gripping onscreen narrative. Read full review
33
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 8, 2019
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. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiSep 17, 2019
An enthralling story on the page, this adaptation fails to capture what good adaptations can: the heart and spirit of a story told in another medium. Read full review
30
Arizona RepublicGarrett MitchellSep 12, 2019
In the end, if someone doesn't have the time to absorb Tartt's book, they'd be better serviced reading a Wikipedia synopsis than seeing this film. Read full review
30
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 11, 2019
It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion. Read full review
25
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiSep 12, 2019
The Goldfinch should be called “CliffsNotes: The Movie,” because after seeing this pedantic film adaptation, I now know all 3 billion plot points of Donna Tartt’s acclaimed 2013 novel. And, like skimming a colorless cheat sheet, I still have no clue what’s so great about it. Read full review
25
San Francisco ChroniclePeter HartlaubSep 10, 2019
Watching The Goldfinch is like reading a novel where someone ripped out every third page from front to back. You can tell there’s a good story, with compelling characters, and maybe a strong mystery. But the connective tissue is missing to the point of constant distraction. Read full review
25
Washington PostAnn HornadaySep 10, 2019
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. Read full review
20
Rolling StonePeter TraversSep 12, 2019
The only achievement in transferring The Goldfinch from page to screen is that it’s a botch job for the ages. Read full review
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