You know you can trust a filmmaker to be an artist and not a slippery hack when he salts his Hollywood-comedy resume with documentaries about his own family. Of course we already knew Michel Gondry occupies an obsessive, handmade, dreamy moviescape all his own — when he isn’t directing The Green Hornet , that is. But his most recent film, The Thorn in the Heart , is personal in a brand new way. It’s essentially a home movie, and as such is both very Gondrian and exactly what name directors aren’t supposed to spend their time on, especially since the meat of Gondry’s family isn’t sensational or tragic or even terribly funny. Like all home movies, and to some mysterious extent all cinema, The Thorn in the Heart is about time, its unstoppable passage and the residue it leaves behind.
