The New Yorker:

In Jesse Eisenberg’s film, a shticky bromance obscures a thoughtful attempt to probe the legacy of the Holocaust.

By Richard Brody

A road movie with a twist, “A Real Pain”—which Jesse Eisenberg wrote, directed, and stars in—builds the eventful but thin foreground of its journey on a deep foundation of memory and history. It’s a strange movie—far better as a concept than as a drama, though the concept is strong enough to provide a sense of inner experience, making up for what the outer, onscreen experience lacks.

It’s the story of two cousins, David Kaplan (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin), who travel together from New York to Poland to honor the memory of their late grandmother, Dory, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Poland and came to the United States after the war. She never spoke to her grandsons of her experiences, but she bequeathed them money to travel to Poland and see the house where she’d grown up. The more organized of the two, David, has arranged for them to join a Jewish-heritage tour and then to make a detour to their grandmother’s home town.

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