A Real Pain: Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg star in 'uproariously funny' drama

"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," said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail.

"He has parlayed that darkly comic irony" – the shrieking dissonance between the monumental evil implied by the word Auschwitz, "and the lush comforts of modern-day tourism – into a truly wonderful film": "A Real Pain" is "uproariously funny", "achingly sad and excruciatingly well observed". Eisenberg (who also directs) plays David, a Jewish New Yorker whose grandmother left money in her will for him and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) to visit Poland, where she narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp.

Although the pair were once close, they have very different personalities: David is anxious and introspective, while Benji is charismatic and unpredictable, a free spirit who is unable to hold down a job. The film has "oodles" of heart and tenderness, and recalls the best work of Woody Allen. It is, in sum, "a small masterpiece".

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"A road movie that is partly about the Holocaust and about America's third-generation attempt at coming to terms with it", "A Real Pain" is a triumph, agreed Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "Effortlessly witty, fluent and astringent", it strikes "a cool, sauntering tonal balance" between the "trivial and the world-historically important", and both Eisenberg and Culkin are "excellent".

The film pulls off the difficult trick of being "ruefully perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, often at the same time", said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. "It also presents characters with issues we grow to understand, and doesn't set about artificially 'fixing' them: how refreshing."