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80This is an extraordinary film.
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70A quiet, unglamorous film that sneaks up on you slowly. I found it had a lovely, peculiar emotional resonance by the time it was over, but it's likely to appeal more to documentary buffs and obsessive Gondry fans than ordinary moviegoers.
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67If he’d pulled back more, Gondry might’ve seen the real story here: how maternal figures often look better to people who don’t actually have them for a mother.
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50The film is well-constructed, as one would expect from Gondry, but it offers little reason for anyone outside the family circle to care about dear old Tante Suzette.
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Gondry captures the leafy radiance of the countryside, and he makes judicious use of special-effects whimsies. But this memory piece will have far more resonance for the Gondry family than for anyone else.
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You might think that the small-scale, straightforward style and intimate connections of The Thorn in the Heart would result in something more emotionally resonant than we’re accustomed to from Mr. Gondry, but you’d be disappointed.
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42But overall, this lazy, sweet trifle seems to express the banality of well-being.
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Should be intriguing to all who know the family, as well as to cineastes yonder at the arty film schools who will lap up its elliptical/self-reflexive style. Normal people will simply walk out on it.
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40Overall, the movie has the bantamweight feel of a really long DVD extra: Little details of the director’s ancestral stomping grounds are appealing, but don’t jell into something satisfying.
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It's a shock, then, that The Thorn in the Heart, Gondry's documentary about his own family, is so unimaginative and inaccessible.
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40This moving but far from revelatory portrait of a beloved family figure registers as too slight and personal for significant theatrical play.
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20The connection they share is clear; the reason we're invited to sit in is foggy at best.