You may not wish to kiss the ground when you finally leave the cinema, but I did: The Goldfinch reviewed

The Goldfinch is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt that centres on a great work of art, unlike this film, which isn’t. A great work of art, that is. This is more a flat, forgettable, colour-by-numbers job, plus it is long (150 minutes, for the love of God) and drags so listlessly it seems even longer. It’s a film with nothing to say, and boy does it take its time not saying it.

This had all its ducks in a row, credentials-wise. The director is John Crowley (Brooklyn), the screenplay is by Peter Straughan (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and the cinematographer is Roger Deakins, who could make your colonoscopy look beautiful, for heaven’s sake. But I suppose you just never know (it can work the other way: Casablanca and Singin’ in the Rain, for example, came off their respective film studios’ conveyor belts and were never intended to be marvellous. They just were. And now I’ll stop distracting myself with films that are good and get back to the business in hand).

For the uninitiated, the novel, which was published in 2013, is a sprawling bildungsroman about 13-year-old Theo Decker whose life is turned violently upside down when, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother. At the behest of an injured, dying old man he makes off with a painting — the 1654 Carel Fabritius masterpiece ‘The Goldfinch’ — and for the next 14 years and several hundred pages it becomes his burden, his solace and his secret as he is flung from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, encountering an array of memorable characters. There’s the sad, rich Park Avenue family who temporarily adopt him, his Russian pal, Boris, the kindly antique dealer Hobie and also Pippa, the young girl who survived the explosion too.