Before Midnight

The latest in the wonderful "Before" series does three important things: It breaks out of the courtship formula, yet retains the series' quality, and it moves the lives of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) forward in ways that are satisfying and believable. True, a romance you once envied might now be a relationship you'd not want to be in, but as long as Celine and Jesse are still talking, there's hope.

A more-than-worthy, expectations-exceeding chapter in one of modern cinema’s finest love stories. As honest, convincing, funny, intimate and natural as its predecessors. Read full review

Where we might have expected a gentle or rueful coda, we get a battle of the sexes as blistering as the best of Tracy/Hepburn, and infinitely more frank. Read full review

Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way, Read full review

This is a movie that mines deep beneath the surface of human feeling. It will make you think - about love, about life, about two people who aren't real, except that they've become so for so many of us in this improbably successful indie franchise. Read full review

If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul. Read full review

Before Midnight is moving because it acknowledges that even love stories that began as beautifully as Jesse and Celine's must still endure the wear and tear of real life. Read full review

What follows is astounding: a thirty-minute fight, which, in its bitterness, complication, and psychological revelation, recalls episodes from Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." [27 May 2013, p.86]

Though everyone is older this time around, and the themes are darker, harder to enjoy, the conversation is just as engrossing. So is the film. Read full review

Before Midnight is the fullest and richest and saddest of the three movies in the trilogy. Make it a quartet, I say. Read full review

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder. Read full review

Delpy and Hawke, who’ve invested this trilogy with the fine shadings of life lived, do extraordinary things with small moments. Read full review

Before Midnight surpasses the two previous films in this trilogy in terms of its intelligence, narrative design, and vivacity. It’s a grand accomplishment, and I feel greedy about wanting to see this film series continue. Read full review

Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect. Read full review

Whatever a modern love story is, Before Midnight takes it to the next level. It's damn near perfect. Read full review

Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a grand experiment — the earnest attempt to depict the life of a relationship onscreen, decade by increasingly tumultuous decade. In the process of justifying its own existence, Before Midnight redeems the very notion of sequels. Read full review

It's a rare and powerful thing to confront something honest and real on the big screen. It stays with you in a way that nothing else can. Before Midnight is fiction but it might as well be a documentary. Read full review

Before Midnight confounds expectations in powerful and even haunting ways. It's not just darker than the previous two films. It's bigger, deeper, and more searching. It follows the characters through a tale of embattled love that extends far beyond them. Read full review

Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love. Read full review

That’s the subtle level this movie operates on, and by the time it arrives at its powerhouse climax, a ruinous argument in a hotel room where all lingering doubts are finally and furiously outed, there’s nowhere left for them to ramble. They’re pinned down and have to improvise, but this glorious movie has infinite space to roam. Read full review

Before Midnight manages to be an emotionally astute and tremendously enjoyable conclusion to this rather improbable trilogy. Read full review

Before Midnight is the rare cinematic achievement that implicates alert viewers in its mission to understand the mysteries of intimate connections. Read full review

The work Richard Linklater and company started in 1995's Before Sunrise retains a clarity of spirit undimmed by 18 years. Read full review

Honoring all that was memorable about its forebears while taking the story to new depths of catharsis, Before Midnight stands as a unique and uniquely satisfying entry in what has shaped up to be an outstanding screen trilogy Read full review

Bravely and with penetrating intelligence, Before Midnight elevates instead the practical, a partnership: frayed by disappointment, worn by time, but for the very luckiest—which we sincerely and selfishly hope includes Jesse and Celine—durable for the long day’s journey into night. Read full review

Delpy and Hawke have never been more persuasive. Nor has the series. Read full review

The films have only gotten better by letting the relationship marinate. "Midnight's" more disgruntled edge reflects what creeps up on couples as years pass, regrets stack up, kids factor in, real life intervenes. Read full review

The film is far from a downer. If anything, more than any of the films in the trilogy, this one may be the most hopeful - and the most affecting. Read full review

It plays like documented fact, a kind of "7 Up" primer on life’s romantic vicissitudes. Read full review

A rich, smart, funny, sometimes acidic portrayal of a couple who can be spectacular when they’re in tune — and toxic when they’re at each other’s throats. Read full review

Bittersweet, intelligently written, deftly acted and painfully honest. Read full review

These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape. Read full review

A bit tarter than its predecessors, but not skimping on their woozy, chatty charm, this perfectly played, gently incisive film is a welcome new chapter in one of cinema’s most beguiling ongoing romances. See it with someone you’ve loved for some time. Read full review

Not only is the result edifying, but it's also rewarding. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper than a therapy session. Read full review

Linklater may not have set out to make a decade-spanning triptych of poetic meditations on youth, young adulthood, and middle age, but he, Hawke, and Delpy have accomplished exactly that. The Before series has steadily gotten better as it goes along, which is more than any but the most optimistic among us dare to hope for from love. Read full review

Before Midnight counts on our previous investment to keep us riveted. We are. And we want them back in spirit on that train to Vienna as much as they do. What’s next — After Sunrise? Read full review

I think the trilogy has come to its natural conclusion: However you interpret the ending, we’ve spent enough time with these two people. Read full review

Delpy has always challenged Hawke to find a simpler, more direct form of acting in Linklater's films, which gives them their unique suspense and rolling tension. Read full review

Richard Linklater's Before Midnight isn't the most digestible picture, but its challenging, funny, painful, very present and alive depiction of relationships at 40 is so honest and real that we wouldn't have it any other way. Read full review

The movie at times resembles a screenwriting workshop, with Delpy and Hawke trying to shoehorn every shade of this shifting relationship into a single scene. It doesn't feel genuine; certainly these two would know each other better by now. Read full review

Luckily, Hawke and Delpy remain as charming as ever, and their combined goofiness is more endearing than annoying. Winning, too, is the sense that this peculiar project, though imperfect, could grow old with its audience and its cast. Read full review