Don't listen to the usual critical establishment: John Crowley & Peter Straughan's adaptation of THE GOLDFINCH proves rich, joyous, artful and moving storytelling

"I can't believe they did it!" raved my spouse as we left the local theater where THE GOLDFINCH has recently opened. Spousie had read the novel a few years back, loved it, and had looked forward ever since to a possible movie version. TrustMovies himself had never read the book and so sat down to view the film as a clean slate. He, too, loved it -- swept away within the opening moments and held fast throughout the two-and-one-half-hours of crackerjack storytelling, wonderful performances, and the most artful melding of past and present, youth and adulthood, time periods, places and -- most important -- that very difficult transition of loss and grief into understanding. Not to mention the uses and importance of art.

Every movie that director John Crowley (shown at right) has so far made is a good one -- from Intermission and Boy A through Is Anybody There?, Closed Circuit and the especially wonderful Brooklyn. And now he has given us what is certainly his most ambitious work and one that, I believe, will hold up beautifully and should have future audiences asking, "How in hell did this one go so unappreciated?"

Interestingly, each of Crowley's six films is in a different genre. He never repeats, and yet each takes its particular genre and lifts it quite nicely. The man is not a writer, but damned if he does not recognize a first-class story -- as well as the way to best bring it to life.

What is so funny -- surprising, rather than hilarious -- is that in the case of The Goldfinch (very well adapted by Peter Straughan from the popular novel by Donna Tartt), were you asked to give a precis of this story, you would be very hard put to do so. It's about so many people and so many things and events. Ms Tartt evidently knew just how to pull the reader into her complex tale, and so, film-wise, does the Crowley/Straughan duo.

The main event in all this the filmmakers do not allow us to see, except in small pieces, throughout their movie. It's major, though, and awful, leading to the kind of loss that can never be patched. Various characters deal with this loss in differing ways, and while it is loss and grief that bind the movie, so fascinating is the story and the characters who fill it that instead of becoming a some kind of "downer," the movie end up lifting us in rather remarkable ways.

The heavy lifting may be done by the filmmakers and Ms Tartt, but the marvelous cast assembled here certainly does its part, too.  The major roles of Theo Decker and his bizarre Russian friend, Boris, are taken by (in adulthood) Ansel Elgort and Aneurin Barnard (above, right and left, respectively) and in childhood by Oakes Fegley (at right, two photos up) and Finn Wolfhard. Each actor is not only exceedingly good, but each also makes a fine older or younger version of himself.

The distaff side is equally well represented by the likes of Nicole Kidman (above), Sarah Paulson (shown at bottom, left), Willa Fitzgerald and Ashley Cummings (below), and again, each is precisely on the mark. Crowley has always been terrific with actors, especially in his understanding of just how hard or soft to go with the various important moments. Here, he hits everyone of them with grace and ease

Crowley and Straughan (along with cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Kelley Dixon)  understand how to create important moments of transition regarding events, characters and moods without ever once hitting us over the head. Demeaning critics have referred to this movie as "flat." Which makes me wonder how any intelligent, genuinely watchful viewer could confuse flatness with artfulness and subtlety?

Well, see for yourself, my friends, as this crackerjack tale moves from New York City to Las Vegas to Amsterdam and back. Along with everything else that's so fine here, the film's last visual is spectacular: Simplicity itself, it unites present and past with a poignancy in which all seems perfection and the best is yet to come. For that moment, at least. (Below, right, is Luke Wilson, with Ms Paulson, who brings new meaning to the term bad dad.)

Distributed via Warner Brothers (with Amazon involved in its financing), The Goldfinch has opened this past week, nationwide. If you love a good story told artfully and beautifully, give it a whirl. Click here to find the theater(s) nearest you.

The Flori-duh movie screening strikes again -- this time to Marielle Heller's quietly delightful CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

TrustMovies dearly hopes that, elsewhere around the country, movie theaters are doing a better job of screening their films than happens down here in South Florida with alarming frequency. I would estimate that every four to five times that I go out to a theater, something untoward occurs that must be remedied before the screening can continue. And this happens as often at critics' screenings as it does when I simply pay to attend a film like most other audiences. Either the film is out of focus, or we get visuals and no sound (or sound without visuals) or, as last night, about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?, the movie simply stopped dead in its tracks, due to some problems with its "projection". After a few minutes, it started up again, only to stop a second and (soon after that) a third time -- after which it never finished at all (from what I'm told, at least; my spouse and I beat a retreat after waiting nearly an extra half hour to no result).

Hint to theater owners: If you are worried about further losing your ever decreasing audiences, this is not the way to remedy that.

As written by Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said) and Jeff Whitty (Shortbus) and directed by Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl), shown at right, Can You ever Forgive Me? moves along at just about a perfect pace, as it tells the based-on-life tale of an ex-successful writer, Lee Israel, and how she became an even-better-known "literary forger."

While TrustMovies does not normally cover a film he hasn't finished viewing, since he does not know at this point if and when he'll get the opportunity to finish this one, and because that first and major portion has saw was so very good, it is hard for him to imagine the rest of the film will not follow suit.

Also, if you're a fan of actress Melissa McCarthy (above and below, and there are a lot of these), know that this may be her very best performance ever. She makes Ms Israel a bitch who -- thanks to the abilities of the actress and the filmmakers to instill such humanity into the woman -- wins us over completely.

Ditto Richard E. Grant (below, right), who plays her best (and nearly only) friend, confidant and eventual henchman, an aging gay con-man who is forever down on his luck.

Heller, Holofcener and Whitty do such a remarkable job of both storytelling and character-building that their tale seems to practically tell itself, balancing comedy and drama, with nary a seam ever showing. We so grow to understand the kind of self-imposed prison that Israel's life has become that it is difficult not to root for her, despite her deception.

Because the movie is so "literary" and 20th-Century-based, some knowledge of the likes of Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, Marlene Dietrich, Fanny Brice and others will certainly increase one's enjoyment. Action lovers had best remain at home. I could certainly watch the whole thing again, simply to savor the wonderful performances -- Dolly Wells' (below, left) among these -- and the witty, dry dialog.

When you see the film, I hope you have better luck at the theater than did we. From Fox Searchlight and running 106 minutes -- 20 or so of which  I still hope to see -- the movie opened on the coasts two weeks ago, and has expanded nationwide with each new week. Here in South Florida it opens this Friday, November 2, in the Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach areas.

An anti-hero of the art world drives Cullman, Grausman & Becker's brilliant ART AND CRAFT

Another first-class documentary arrives in theaters this week: ART AND CRAFT, the tale of a most unusual art forger that our current art world, I suspect, would rather keep under wraps. The product of a directorial trio -- Sam Cullman (below, right, and co-director of the Oscar-nominated If a Tree Falls), Jennifer Grausman (below, left) and Mark Becker (who, along with Ms Grausman, co-directed Pressure Cooker), the movie introduces us to a Virginia-born fellow named Mark Landis, a quietly self-effacing man nearing sixty years of age with a voice somewhat like that of the late Truman Capote and a skill for drawing and painting in multiple styles that is simply uncanny.

Mr. Landis pretty much tells us his own tale, with some prodding from a journalist or two hoping to get a good story out of all this. (They do, as do the moviemakers.) Such a quiet, non-threatening man is Landis, with his slight frame, large ears, bald head and near-apologetic attitude that he finally becomes one of the more endearing, if sad, narrators in the history of documentaries.

With some difficult family history, and problems both mental (he is said to be schizophrenic) and physical, the movie offers some extra suspense in regard to whether or not this odd little man will make it to the next frame of the film. Landis may be an art forger, but he is not, we are told, a criminal because he has never profited from any of his forgeries. He creates them and then "donates" them to various museum around the country -- who have proven only too willing to accept this "largess."

Landis, it turns out, is as adept at forging Watteau as he is Walt Disney, Daumier and Picasso, and he also excels at disguise of sorts (dressing up as a man-of-god, he claims to have learned how to do all this from the British TV series Father Brown) and at creating the special "provenance" that attends each piece of art that he donates.

Forger or not, you're unlikely to find a "dearer," more soothing fellow on screen these days, and the movie-makers have surrounded him with some other very interesting characters, too. There are those journalists, a few of the museum folk he's fooled, and especially the man -- Matt Leininger (above, left), the former registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art-- who first "cottoned on" to Landis' scams back in 2008 and has become, over the ensuing years, a tad obsessive about tracking him down and making sure that he can't continue on this forgery route.

We get to know Leininger, not as well as we do Landis, but well enough to identify with and enjoy him. The filmmakers, in their unobtrusive way, have managed to capture both men quite beautifully, particularly Mr. Landis -- who will almost immediately become, in the words of that old Readers' Digest phrase, one of the most unforgettable characters you have ever met.

We get enough of Landis' family history, in addition to seeing him with doctors and social workers, to realize that he is "off the grid" in certain aspects. This serves to keep us viewers just a little off balance, as we try to piece together how far off our artist/forger actually is. Is he schizoid, bi-polar, and just "different"? And what of the all those duped curators and registrars in the museums whom our guy fooled. Is "due diligence" not worth bothering about any longer?

By the time an actual art show of Landis' work is being organized for an opening at an Ohio museum, the ironies are flying so thick and fast that you'll have to take a breath. "Do you plan on continuing to 'gift'?"the artist is asked during the opening of the show. He pauses to consider, and then: "I'll have to think about it," he answers.

Art and Craft , from Oscilloscope, is surely one of the most graceful and sweet, endearing and enduring documentaries about an outsider and his world that we have yet seen. It opens in New York theaters -- at the Angelika Film Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas -- this Friday, September 19, and will hit Los Angeles at the Landmark NuArt on Friday, September 26. In the weeks and months to come, it will play another 20-odd cities and theaters. For all currently scheduled playdates, click here and scroll down.