‘A Real Pain’ Review: Jesse Eisenberg Becomes a Major Filmmaker — and Kieran Culkin a Movie Star — in a Funny, Knife-Sharp Odyssey
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic More actors than ever are now stepping behind the camera to take a shot at directing. To me, they always end up falling into one of three categories.
There are the ones who simply aren’t very good at it. There are the ones who wind up making a movie that’s A-okay (not better, not worse), often because they’re more attuned to the nuances of guiding their fellow actors than they are to the grander artistic machinery of filmmaking.
And then there’s the elite third category: those rare actors — Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper — who turn out to be born filmmakers.
To that hallowed company we can now add the name Jesse Eisenberg. “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.
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