The Goldfinch (2019) review

Theo (Oakes Fegley as a teen, Ansel Elgort as an adult) survives a terrorist bombing at the MET - which took the life of his mother - and leaves with a famous painting, The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, which everyone thinks was destroyed in the blast.  I understand that adapting Donna Tartt's sizeable book isn't the easiest task (she only writes one novel every decade or so) but screenwriter Peter Straughan had to have done a better job than just sketching out a bare outline and filming the bones: it flips back and forth between adult Theo and kid Theo haphazardly and is unable to translate the book's Dickensian mood (and charming prose) to the screen (it also neuters the homoerotic tension between Theo and his friend Boris).  The failure of this is naturally not the fault of the performers - although it might have been unwise to ask Finn Wolfhard to do a Russian accent - and smartly leaves Jeffrey Wright's antique dealer/surrogate father to deliver the message (about immortality through art) in case anyone wasn't paying attention.