The Goldfinch was one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated films until the critics got hold of it and audiences decided to give it a pass. The film version of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has its faults, but it is a film that deserves to be seen.

The main criticisms of the film come from people who have read the Dickensian novel and miss the rich characterizations in the 800-page work that are only hinted at in the film. People who haven’t read the novel are more inclined to appreciate it. Not having read Tartt’s 2013 novel before seeing the film, I nonetheless had a couple of peeves with the way the film played out.

My biggest peeve was the non-linear progression of the film that weaves back and forth between the past, present, and future with the two actors playing the protagonist as a 13-year-old and a twenty-something character, unlike the novel which proceeds in linear fashion.

Even though it’s obvious early on that the boy Theo, whose mother died in an explosion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has stolen the titled painting from the museum and carried it out under his coat, that information isn’t given the audience until well into the film. Similarly, the close bond between mother and son that is explored in the novel is not seen in the film until it is shown in flashback near the end of the film. This throws the film off-kilter because although we sense that the negative things the boy’s deadbeat father says about her are untrue, without having seen their relationship early on we can only assume that he is lying.

Although we do see the boy interact with the mother of a friend who takes him in, we don’t feel the loss of their later separation as much as readers of the novel because that years-long separation only lasts ten minutes of screen time. It undercuts the poignancy of the reunion which is key to our understanding of why the now grown man agrees to marry the woman’s daughter even though it’s clear that he and the girl don’t love each other. It’s because he yearns to be part of her family.

My other big peeve was the abrupt ending. It wouldn’t have hurt to add a few minutes to the already 2-½ hour film to wrap up the story which I later learned has the protagonist doing good to compensate for all the bad things he had done in his earlier life.

On the plus side, however, are the rich characterizations of the cast and the beautiful cinematography of Roger Deakins.

Deakins, the world class cinematographer responsible for such beautifully photographed films as The Shawshank Redemption, Fargo, The Reader, Skyfall, and Unbroken had to wait until his 14th Oscar nomination for Blade Runner 2049 to finally win.

Both Oakes Fegley (Wonderstruck) as Theo the boy and Ansel Elgort (The Fault in Our Stars) as the grown Theo are excellent as are both Finn Wolfhard (It) and Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk) as Boris, the boy from Ukraine, and his adult counterpart, who is Theo’s partner in crime.

The excellent supporting cast includes Ryan Foust (Broadway’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as Theo’s boyhood friend Andy, Nicole Kidman as Andy’s mother, Owen Wilson and Sarah Paulson as Theo’s deadbeat father and his girlfriend, and Jeffrey Wright as Hobie, the antiques dealer who takes in Theo as a lost child and later becomes the grown Theo’s business partner under the direction of John Crowley (Brooklyn).

The Goldfinch is available on both Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Criterion has released newly restored versions of 1933’s The Story of Temple Drake and 1960’s Tunes of Glory, two films that couldn’t be more different in style or direction. The former was directed by Stephen Roberts whose career ended abruptly with his death in 1936 at the age of 40. The latter was directed by Ronald Neame who worked behind the camera until 1990 and in front of it still giving interviews until 2007 three years before his death at the age of 99.

The Story of Temple Drake was perhaps the most notorious film of Hollywood’s early talkie pre-Code era. Adapted from William Faulkner’s scandalous Sanctuary about a wealthy neurotic Southern belle who is held captive and raped by a vicious bootlegger she eventually shoots. Extras include an examination of the Hollywood Production Code and appreciations of cinematographer Karl Struss (Sunrise) and the film’s star, Miriam Hopkins (Design for Living), both of whose work transcends the notoriety that kept the film out pf circulation for decades.

Tunes of Glory, gloriously restored in 4K, is a no-holds-barred battle for the respect and loyalty of the members of a Scottish regiment after World War II in which the rebel-rousing acting commander (Alec Guinness) is replaced by an Oxford-educated by-the-books colonel (John Mills) in which both actors give tour-de-force performances. Dennis Price, Kay Walsh, John Fraser, and Susannah York co-star. Extras include an on-camera interview with Neame from 2003, an audio interview with Mills from 2002 and an on-camera interview with Guinness from 1973, all extras having been imported from the previous DVD release.

Slaughterhouse-Five has been given a 4K Blu-ray restoration by Arrow Films. The 1972 adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel was the film director George Roy Hill selected as his follow-up to 1969’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The science-fiction classic tells the story of Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks), the mild-mannered optometrist who becomes unstuck in time and is abducted by aliens. Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche, Sharon Gless, Valerie Perrine, Holly Near, Perry King, and Kevin Conway have featured roles. An on-screen interview with King is one of the numerous extras accompanying this one-of-a-kind film from Hill who would go on to win the following year’s Oscar for Best Director for The Sting.

With so many unreleased classics at their disposal, it seems odd that Warner Archive would produce a Blu-ray of such a minor western as 1956’s Great Day in the Morning, but this unlikely release does have its moments.

Robert Stack plays the former Confederate soldier in neutral Denver in the days leading up to the Civil War who gets involved with soldiers on both sides of the conflict. Top-billed Virginia Mayo and Ruth Roman are the gals who fight over him. Alex Nicol, Raymond Burr, and Regis Toomey co-star under the direction of Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past).

Extras include four noteworthy short subjects directed by Tourneur between 1938 and 1942.

This week’s new releases include Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood and Hustlers.