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BRIAN VINER reviews A Real Pain: A masterpiece from the heir to Woody Allen
Jesse Eisenberg has said that he was inspired to write A Real Pain after coming across an online advert promoting tours of the concentration camp Auschwitz, with lunch included.
He has parlayed that darkly comic irony — the unwitting but shrieking dissonance between the monumental evil and human misery implied by one word, Auschwitz, and the lush comforts of modern-day tourism — into a truly wonderful film. He and Culkin, in some ways playing an even more unpredictable version of Roman Roy, his character in the TV hit Succession, are completely believable as loving cousins, although David, perennially envious of Benji's magnetism, also finds him utterly exasperating. The same claim cannot be made for Babygirl, and it's not without some narrative silliness, but on the whole it's a clever, racy, psychosexual thriller starring Nicole Kidman as Romy, a corporate hotshot who seems to be happily married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director, but then falls, heavily, for one of her company's new intake of interns, the dishy, ultra-confident Samuel (Harris Dickinson).
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