Adventureland (2009) NYT Critics' Pick

[lsanderson]

Jesse Eisenberg, Martin Starr and Kristen Stewart in "Adventureland."
April 3, 2009
Coming of Age on the Midway
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: April 3, 2009

It’s the summer of 1987. The stock market crash is a few months off, but for James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) things have already taken a recessionary turn. His father (Jack Gilpin), a wilted, weak-chinned alcoholic, has been demoted, and the resulting financial pinch puts the kibosh on James’s rather modest postcollegiate dream of a summer in Europe followed by graduate school at Columbia. (His sights were set on journalism school, and given what his midcareer, 40-something self would be facing two decades later, it’s probably just as well he didn’t go.) More