[Keiran Culkin] is remarkable from the opening scene to the final moment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 21, 2025

Eisenberg tenderly and firmly directs the movie, entering the Holocaust experience through a comic road trip, speaking of modern life and several unmined feelings that continue to haunt third generation Americans.

| Jan 28, 2025

... it is also distinctly a film about the boundaries and limits of love.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 18, 2025

It may be formally unadventurous but A Real Pain is a real treat, a tender, funny treatise on family jealousies and our relationship to the past. Simultaneously light and heavy, it soars on the stellar pairing of Eisenberg and Culkin.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 16, 2025

Inseparable as kids, our two heroes now make a classic odd couple, even if that comic staple seems a strange fit indeed for the gravity ahead.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 15, 2025

Lovely use of [Frédéric] Chopin.

| Jan 14, 2025

A substantial and emotionally nourishing journey that contains, courtesy of Culkin, perhaps the most devastating final shot of any film you will see this year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 14, 2025

A touching, funny drama that allows truths to emerge subtly and sometimes ambiguously.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2025

A Real Pain is a film that’s really an ellipsis. That’s where it derives its tender power.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2025

The film is a triumph, delivering a story that transforms deeply rooted pain into something profoundly human.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2025

A Real Pain is only the second film Jesse Eisenberg has made as writer and director as well as actor, but it’s a masterpiece already.

| Jan 8, 2025

With no great fanfare, Jesse Eisenberg has just given us a masterpiece. This is an effortlessly witty, fluent and astringent comedy with a very serious overcurrent.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 8, 2025

There are moments when you can imagine how the movie might gain in depth if it spiralled out of control rather than remaining a neat equation, but this never seems likely. Eisenberg is more of a David than a Benji, in other words.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 21, 2024

Jesse Eisenberg has nothing to prove; he has already staked his claim as an actor, writer, and director. But A Real Pain digs deeper than he ever has before—and it’s a really good movie

| Nov 24, 2024

Eisenberg’s direction is perfect — and a perfect match for Culkin’s performance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 19, 2024

Holocaust humor is rare, but A Real Pain is a counterintuitive outlier: vivid, moving, funny and emotionally devastating.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 15, 2024

(An) enormously satisfying, darkly-shaded road-trip comedy about family, faith and finding yourself.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 15, 2024

The film has pain in its title. But it’s pleasure the viewer will feel once the credits roll at the end.

| Nov 15, 2024

We’re taken on a trip with David and Benji, one that examines Jewish identity, generational trauma, siblinglike rivalry and the strangeness of being in a country you don’t recognize, but that’s nonetheless partly your own.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 14, 2024

Kieran Culkin gives a career-best performance in taking a character who could have been a one-dimensional, shtick-reliant jerk and infusing him with a vulnerability and empathy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2024