A Real Pain
| Release Date: November 1, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
85
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 55 Critic Reviews
Positive:
51
Mixed:
3
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawJan 8, 2025
Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure. Read full review
100
We Got This CoveredCharlotte SimmonsNov 18, 2024
Pivoting gut-punching drama and whip-smart comedy around a career-best turn from Kieran Culkin, 'A Real Pain' is a real treat of the highest caliber. Read full review
100
Washington PostTy BurrNov 14, 2024
Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleNov 12, 2024
With “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg has invented a new genre we can call “the Kieran Culkin movie.” Read full review
100
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzNov 12, 2024
With “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — pulls off a kind of magic trick. He’s made a movie with backdrops of pain and despair, both personal and existential, that is also funny, charming and something approaching uplifting. Ta-da! Read full review
100
The TimesEd PottonNov 7, 2024
This is a story that is perfectly weighted between bleak and warm, poignant and irreverent. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoOct 31, 2024
It’s a powerful feeling to witness art that reminds us that all aspects of our existence are valuable, especially our pain. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisOct 31, 2024
A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama. Read full review
100
ObserverOliver JonesOct 30, 2024
Admittedly, A Real Pain is an acquired taste; like a top-flight IPA, it is at once overly aggressive and serenely balanced. Read full review
100
VarietyOwen GleibermanJan 21, 2024
A Real Pain is an easy watch, a buddy movie rooted in the existential fun of verbal sparring. Yet it has an emotional kick that sneaks up on you. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyJan 21, 2024
With A Real Pain, [Eisenberg] demonstrates impeccable judgment and great skill at balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned. Read full review
91
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerNov 1, 2024
There ends up being something really profound about the way A Real Pain lets the undercurrent of history serve as contrast to the deeply felt emotions of its core character story. Read full review
91
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodJan 21, 2024
While Eisenberg is excellent on screen, especially during a dinner scene when he unloads his concerns over David to his fellow tourists, it’s Culkin who, rightfully, steals the film. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Ben KaplanNov 14, 2024
It’s funny, sad and beautifully acted, and, like the best indie fare, it offers no pat conclusions. Read full review
90
TimeStaff (Not Credited)Nov 4, 2024
Somehow, it just sprang from Eisenberg’s heart and quietly formidable brain, and the effect is close to miraculous. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesGary GoldsteinNov 1, 2024
Eisenberg furthers himself here as a distinctive voice, one with a keen visual sense, a masterful ability to juggle tones and an innate feel for timing and pacing. Read full review
90
Rolling StoneDavid FearOct 29, 2024
What Eisenberg accomplishes overall here, however, is beyond measure. It’s the real deal. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJoshua RothkopfFeb 12, 2024
Not only has a real filmmaker emerged with A Real Pain, with both the sensitivity and boldness that could launch a career, but Eisenberg has never let himself be this exposed as a performer. Read full review
90
TheWrapJan 21, 2024
Though the film only provides a snapshot of a moment in time, Culkin’s performance is so spectacular that it makes it feel as though we have known Benji forever. Read full review
90
Screen DailyTim GriersonJan 21, 2024
So many films have tackled the underlying tensions between diametrically opposed family members, but here Eisenberg sidesteps cliches, consistently complicating our feelings about these nuanced cousins. Read full review
90
ColliderTaylor GatesJan 21, 2024
Eisenberg knocks it out of the park and proves he is a triple threat to be reckoned with, with solid writing, confident directing, and stellar acting — even if, at the end of the day, the film really does belong to Culkin. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsNov 14, 2024
A Real Pain, shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.” Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldNov 14, 2024
By the film’s poignant final scenes, you feel like you’ve really been somewhere, with a new appreciation of what it means to be home. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonNov 12, 2024
The entire cast does stellar work, but this is Culkin’s movie. The “Succession” star makes Benji’s arrested development relatable instead of pitiful, and you can’t help but feel for him even when he’s being obnoxious. Read full review
88
ABC NewsPeter TraversOct 25, 2024
Take in the pleasure of real teamwork as the gifted writer-director-actor Jesse Eisenberg joins an Oscar worthy Kieran Culkin for a deeply felt dramedy about two New York cousins on a tour of Poland where their late grandma survived a Nazi death camp? You’ll laugh till it hurts. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineChris BarsantiJan 29, 2024
The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance. Read full review
88
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiJan 21, 2024
Impressive throughout is the way Eisenberg balances reverence for his locations and belly-grabbing comedy, while using those elements to support each other. Read full review
85
The Daily BeastNick SchagerJan 20, 2024
Together, [Culkin and Eisenberg] make for a winning pair, balancing each other in a variety of ways that speak to the material’s larger concerns about loss, grief, remembrance and regret. Read full review
83
Original-CinKaren GordonNov 6, 2024
Superficially, it plays like an indie buddy comedy. But this film walks lightly and comes at its subject matter so obliquely, that it never aims to overwhelm the viewer. It’s about a multitude of deep emotional things, including grief, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of love. Read full review
83
The Film StageDan MeccaJan 22, 2024
That Culkin has both the charm and bite to carry it is superb, and there’s a bravery to the open-endedness Eisenberg permits. It’s clearly a personal endeavor and clear point of growth as a filmmaker. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyDevan CogganJan 22, 2024
A film that grapples with the legacy of the Holocaust doesn’t exactly make for automatic comedy, but Eisenberg deftly juggles the film’s shifting tones, evoking real laughs in some scenes while maintaining a somber respect in others. Read full review
80
NMEJames MottramFeb 28, 2025
A road movie that really makes you think about the stops it makes, there is real pain inside this film; Eisenberg and his cast do well to ensure you’ll feel every moment of it. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyJan 9, 2025
Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJan 8, 2025
A small film about great matters. Read full review
80
Little White LiesKatherine McLaughlinJan 7, 2025
A Real Pain may set out its stall as an empathetic tour of pain, effortlessly exposing the quiet and chaos of the human condition through its multiple characters and the places they visit, but it is also distinctly a film about the boundaries and limits of love. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerJan 6, 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. Read full review
80
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerNov 1, 2024
A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look. Read full review
80
IGNLex BriscusoOct 25, 2024
A Real Pain is a hilarious and tender drama that shows us that truly living is the only way to honor those we've lost. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyOct 16, 2024
A Real Pain is a very welcome throwback to a type of indie comedy-drama that had all but disappeared. It manages to be ruefully perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, often at the same time: that’s not easy. It also presents characters with issues we grow to understand, and doesn’t set about artificially “fixing” them: how refreshing. Read full review
80
Time OutPhil de SemlyenJan 29, 2024
Culkin, just as motor-mouthed and f-bombing as Succession’s Roman Roy, but here with an extra slug of despair, is the manic yin to Eisenberg’s neurotic but compassionate yang. It’s an inspired on-screen pairing that plays to both actor’s strengths and finds space for melancholy amid some deeply awkward laughs. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriJan 26, 2024
The picture’s charming modesty is its great virtue; it’s a light movie with a heavy heart. Read full review
80
Total FilmJordan FarleyJan 25, 2024
While the film occasionally pushes you to feel as deeply as Benji, something it can’t quite pull off, there is a profundity to David and Benji’s pilgrimage that leaves an unmistakable impression. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesNov 14, 2024
These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 18, 2024
It’s a funny film, but never actually hilarious. It has its touching scenes, its mild jolts of surprise. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliNov 14, 2024
A Real Pain will resonate most strongly with movie-goers who don’t mind films in which conflict is internalized and where human interaction – simple, vivid, and unforced – takes center stage. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperNov 13, 2024
This is a smart and accomplished work with a quick wit, a palpable sense of melancholy and genuine heart. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckOct 30, 2024
It’s quite a journey for one film. All credit to Eisenberg, and his superb co-star, for making the road trip so thought-provoking. Read full review
75
IndieWireSiddhant AdlakhaJan 21, 2024
Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through. Read full review
73
PolygonAusten GoslinJan 29, 2024
A Real Pain isn’t a movie about real conclusions or grand statements, but one about deeply personal relationships and how pain and history can affect them. In that way, it’s powerful, as well as deeply funny and touching. Read full review
70
Paste MagazineJim VorelNov 12, 2024
It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerOct 3, 2024
There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material. Read full review
60
The New YorkerRichard BrodyNov 5, 2024
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. Read full review
60
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiFeb 2, 2024
With personal and generational trauma at the forefront of the story, Eisenberg delivers a heartwarming film that strengthens family ties and underscores the difficulty in speaking about the pain between its members, no matter how close they used to be. Read full review
60
The GuardianAdrian HortonJan 21, 2024
A Real Pain is occasionally insightful on the subject of suffering, sometimes funny, a bit endearing, a little pretentious, often dry. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithNov 1, 2024
It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety. Read full review
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