A Real Pain - June 16, 2025 @ 8:00 PM
Capitol Theatre | Comedy/Drama | 90 Minutes | English
It has been rare over our many years to lead off the Windsor Jewish Film Festival with a popular major American studio release with well-known stars, but we are very happy to do it this year. A Real Pain, with an acting Oscar for Kieran Culkin, an Oscar nomination for original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg and film awards around the world, has been a huge success in theaters and Jewish film festivals. It tells a story that is both intensely Jewish in its background and setting but also universal in the family dynamics of its protagonists and the human dynamics of its other characters on a heritage tour of Poland and its Holocaust history.
Though he is writer, director and lead actor, Eisenberg gives centre stage to Culkin, whose performance navigates between heartbreaking and hilarious. It is a movie which is about the Holocaust, but mostly about America’s third-generation survivors’ attempts at coming to terms with ongoing trauma, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painful to revisit or necessary to forget to survive. It is also about any family, male friendship and growing older.
Capitol Theatre | Comedy/Drama | 90 Minutes | English
It has been rare over our many years to lead off the Windsor Jewish Film Festival with a popular major American studio release with well-known stars, but we are very happy to do it this year. A Real Pain, with an acting Oscar for Kieran Culkin, an Oscar nomination for original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg and film awards around the world, has been a huge success in theaters and Jewish film festivals. It tells a story that is both intensely Jewish in its background and setting but also universal in the family dynamics of its protagonists and the human dynamics of its other characters on a heritage tour of Poland and its Holocaust history.
Though he is writer, director and lead actor, Eisenberg gives centre stage to Culkin, whose performance navigates between heartbreaking and hilarious. It is a movie which is about the Holocaust, but mostly about America’s third-generation survivors’ attempts at coming to terms with ongoing trauma, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painful to revisit or necessary to forget to survive. It is also about any family, male friendship and growing older.
Capitol Theatre | Comedy/Drama | 90 Minutes | English
It has been rare over our many years to lead off the Windsor Jewish Film Festival with a popular major American studio release with well-known stars, but we are very happy to do it this year. A Real Pain, with an acting Oscar for Kieran Culkin, an Oscar nomination for original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg and film awards around the world, has been a huge success in theaters and Jewish film festivals. It tells a story that is both intensely Jewish in its background and setting but also universal in the family dynamics of its protagonists and the human dynamics of its other characters on a heritage tour of Poland and its Holocaust history.
Though he is writer, director and lead actor, Eisenberg gives centre stage to Culkin, whose performance navigates between heartbreaking and hilarious. It is a movie which is about the Holocaust, but mostly about America’s third-generation survivors’ attempts at coming to terms with ongoing trauma, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painful to revisit or necessary to forget to survive. It is also about any family, male friendship and growing older.