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BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Richard Linklater United States, 2013
Screen romances do not as a rule lend themselves to sequels. To extrapolate beyond the conclusion of most love stories is to complicate, or to shatter, the myth of happily ever after. It could be said that Before Midnight belongs to an entirely different, and considerably trickier, genre than its predecessors—that of the marriage movie (even if Jesse and Celine are not technically hitched).
March 1, 2017
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Though together as a result of their genuine loving bond, BEFORE MIDNIGHT openly and boldly questions why they remain connected. A lengthy scene during dinner with friends young and old allows for an egalitarian discussion of just this idea, expressing in a different way what Linklater's films are: interim reports on the shifting definition of love as we age. The scene also sets up one of the most remarkable quarrels on film, elegantly shot and staged.
August 30, 2013
Filmkrant
Linklater has always flirted (in an artistic sense) with superficiality: it is both the challenge that he works with, and the trap into which he sometimes plunges. He likes to keep things light, a bit mundane and trivial. His characters blather on, enjoy the small things in life, occasionally skirt around a major problem... But the Before series has, on this level, deteriorated from one film to the next...
August 30, 2013
If you can ignore the lunchtime scene, the film is near-perfect. All the small things about the couple – Celine's self-conscious irreverence in an old church, slacker Jesse saying of someone he dislikes that "when I look at him, all I see is ambition", above all the unforced rapport between Celine and Jesse (or is it Delpy and Hawke?) – emerge so naturally that the lines between actor and character become imperceptible. The entire final act in the hotel is one for the ages.
August 26, 2013
Getting older, the rawness of youth planed and sheened, greedy ambitions and lust for life tempered and compromised: no fictional series of movies – not Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films (and among documentaries perhaps only Michael Apted's Up series) – has ever chronicled this inexorable journey with such tenderness.
June 21, 2013
As much as Before Midnight impresses as a kind of caustic bourgeois soap opera, it's the cadence, inflection, intonation, rhythm and tone of words that are the film's foremost pleasures. Delpy and Hawke have not merely learned their lines and barked them at one another, but have developed an elaborate catalogue of gesticulations and voices that blur the line between what is being said and what is being meant.
June 20, 2013
The film's (re)watchability is a testament not simply to the wisdom imparted but to the dramatic musicality of its tone, the transparent rapport between the stars, and Delpy's brilliant understanding that one key to playing matrimonial anger is to add a pinch of sarcasm to cut the sense of oppression. But Hawke is just as good at remaining cool while Delpy overheats. Both actors make you feel why each is good for the other.
June 19, 2013
Before Midnight never quite reaches the levels of vitriolic outpouring achieved in Bergman's towering 1973 relationship drama [Scene from a Marriage]—but then again, Linklater's never been a director for whom profound moments emerge out of extreme conflict... The film's hotel sequence—one of the most confident, moving passages in Linklater's career—is a marvel of rich dialogue craftsmanship, with the couple balancing on a knife's edge between tenderness and hostility throughout.
June 14, 2013
Though it doesn't quite reach the heights of Sunset, Before Midnight works in part because its two stars have continued to age well into their parts. Hawke in particular, whose career as an actor seems to be one long journey from fresh-faced self-absorption to weathered neurosis, does a terrific job tempering Jesse's alpha-male swagger with a kind of haunted quality: Beneath all that confidence, he seems so lost at times you want to give him a hug.
June 13, 2013
For the first time, their narrative has been contrived with a distinct lack of urgency. Will these two, known to us so much for their intellectually searching, bedeviling, and sometimes maddening conversation, still have things to talk about? Or more to the point, will they find the time to do it? It's a question that this very self-conscious and very special film is quite aware of, and one it responds to brilliantly.
May 24, 2013
Before Midnight comes pretty damn close [to equalling Rossellini's Journey to Italy] (the one thing I think holds it back from perfection is arguably unavoidable, given the movie's rooting interest in its lead characters), and while some might call the picture a gabfest, its sense of cinematic unity is more astute than most movies containing three or four or 10 or 20 times as many shots.
May 23, 2013
The third film finds a greater distance traveled than that between the first and second. If once the young pair could be brashly cynical—and romantic—about so much because they had experienced little, now the accumulation of things said and done militate against the survival of the relationship, which rather than a dream is now real—and difficult... The magic trick of the Before films is extended for one more what-happened-next, and it's as terrifying and wondrous as any relationship can be.
May 22, 2013