Despite stellar performances from Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, and Jeffrey Wright, The Goldfinch proves to be just too melancholy in a very meandering fashion.

On first encountering the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man drugged and kidnapped from an educated, domestic life by opportunistic slave-traders in Washington D.C., director Steve McQueen felt he had read the “[A...