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‘A Real Pain’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg Becomes a Major Filmmaker — and Kieran Culkin a Movie Star — in a Funny, Knife-Sharp Odyssey
Kieran Culkin costars with Eisenberg in a road movie about two Jewish cousins taking a group tour through Poland.
“ A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed, and co-stars in, premiered yesterday at Sundance, and it’s a delight and a revelation — a deft, funny, heady, beautifully staged ramble of a road movie about two Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who are taking what someone calls a group “Holocaust tour” of Poland. The film presents Benji as a version of the Magical Pest character — the one played by Bill Murray in “What About Bob?,” Owen Wilson in “You, Me and Dupree,” and Adam Sandler in “That’s My Boy,” the hellacious man-child the world should shun, only he turns out to be the life of the party. The other actors all make their marks — Jennifer Grey as a perky but mournful newly divorced Los Angeles “lady who lunches,” Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy as a stolid bourgeois couple, Kurt Egyiawan as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism.
Or read this on Variety
