Our guests this week were ‘A Real Pain’...just joking, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin were actually really nice...

They sit down with Simon to discuss the comedy-drama, directed, written, produced by and starring Eisenberg alongside Culkin. They play two mismatched cousins David and Benji on a tour of Poland, the ancestral home of their late-grandmother, where they hope to reconnect with their Jewish roots—and each other. With Benji lacking in a social filer (as, delightfully, is Kieran Culkin is in real life—just ask Simon!) their trip isn’t as straightforward as the uptight David planned.

Hear what Mark thought of the film, plus reviews of ‘Maria’—Pablo Larraín’s biopic of legendary opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie), reflecting on her public and private life in its last days in 1970s Paris—and ‘Babygirl’, the psychosexual thriller starring Nicole Kidman as a high-powered but privately dissatisfied CEO embroiled in an affair with Harris Dickinson’s much younger intern at her firm.

Not forgetting your takes on ‘Nosferatu’, ‘We Live In Time’ and more from our bursting postbag of correspondence. Keep it coming!

Timecodes (for Vanguardistas listening ad-free):

Maria Review: 05:39

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg: 27:31

A Real Pain Review: 44:07

Laughter lift: 50:00

Babygirl Review: 54:17

You can contact the show by emailing [email protected] or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo

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