Jesse Eisenberg

“A Real Pain” and the Burden of Survival

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Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut walks us through memory, grief, and the unresolved distance between family members

Late in A Real Pain, the film offers the hallmarks of an emotional climax. The childhood home of a Holocaust survivor, rediscovered by her two American grandsons. The camera lingers, the characters pause, a symbolic gesture is made. And then—nothing. No cathartis. No monologue. Just a stretch of quiet that first feels unresolved, until you realize it isn’t. The silence is the answer.

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“The End of the Tour” Gives Us a Great David Foster Wallace, and a Solid Conversation

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On September 12th, 2008, novelist David Foster Wallace committed suicide.  Most famous for his seminal novel Infinite Jest, Wallace’s death reverberated throughout the literary community.  Fellow writer David Lipsky reels at this news, as Lipsky had interviewed Wallace for Rolling Stone over a period of twelve days at the end of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest.  James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour begins here, with Lipsky unearthing the shelved tapes from these interviews in an effort to revisit “the best conversation [he’s] ever had”.

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